Dementia Test - Early Dementia Test

Dementia Test - In everyday clinical practice, health professionals have not always trained neuropsychologists, or fast and efficient diagnostic tools to detect patients with neurodegenerative diseases. On the other hand there is Neuropsychological studies that demand long time.

For this reason, Argentine researchers developed a tool that presents a high sensitivity and specificity to differentiate healthy patients of those who begin to show symptoms of dementia. The test, created by specialists of the Institute of cognitive neurology (INECO), recently being featured in the online version of the scientific journal, The Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

Dementia Test - Early Dementia Test

"The study we design is intended to achieve early diagnosis for a treatment in a timely manner," he said to the Agency CyTA Teresa Torralva, Chief of Neuropsychology INECO and the Institute of neuroscience of the Favaloro Foundation. And he added: "while many brief and sensitive tests are available to detect cognitive dysfunction, few have been developed to assess the executive functions in a quick way. These operations are a set of mental processes that allow planning actions, organizing and controlling behavior, inhibit responses or to be able to abstract concepts, among other functions."

A person with some form of dementia usually has difficulties in organizing and planning activities such as making a list of supermarket shopping, ingredients that are needed for the preparation of a meal plan or be able to abstract the meaning of a saying, said Torralva, Director of the research team that designed the test.

The designed tool called Screening front INECO (IFS), has a time of Administration for 5-7 minutes and offers simple instructions for health specialists to manage it to their patients.

"The test is divided into 8 subtests. In the first, for example, called motor series the patient must copy the sequence of movements that the doctor makes: "fist, singing, palma," requiring a motor sequencing highly dependent of the frontal lobes. Other subtest consists of verbal memory tasks which in this case is the months of the year in reverse order. "Also there are tests that evaluate the ability of abstraction through the interpretation of proverbs, and the inhibitory control motor and verbal (inhibiting a dominant response), among others", said Torralva, who also serves as Professor of neuroscience of the Favaloro University courses.

Study of validity

INECO researchers used the test to evaluate to 25 with Alzheimer's disease, 26 without any type of dementia, i.e. normal controls, and 22 patients with a diagnosis of behavioral variant Frontotemporal Dementia.

Frontotemporal dementia affects the prefrontal regions and the anterior region of the temporal lobes of the brain, but not all patients have affected the same structures in the same way within these brain regions, which is often observe a great diversity in cognitive difficulties. "However, beyond the differences, all patients with this picture have a specific disorder of executive functions, which has a severe impact on the functioning of the patient in their daily lives," said the specialist. And continued: "In the case of Alzheimer's disease, even though it exists in many cases Executive involvement during the early stages of the disease, patients have difficulties mainly in memory, and therefore are ideal to contrast with patients with frontotemporal dementia."

The results were that the test presented more than 96 per cent of sensitivity to differentiate healthy patients of those with dementia, "by which is useful for the differential diagnosis of dementia Frontotemporal and Alzheimer's disease", said Torralva.

Currently, the INECO research team works to demonstrate the usefulness of this tool in the detection of Executive difficulties in other illnesses, not only in the field of Neurology, but also in psychiatric and neuropsychiatric illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder disorder, vascular dementia, among others.

"Definitely is vital to count with tools, sensitive and specific for the early detection of neurological diseases with the aim to design treatments early, that will help our patients and their families to improve their quality of life", said Torralva. And he added: "recommend the use of this tool to all that health professional (clinician, neurologist, psychiatrist, psychologist, occupational therapist) who wants to have data about the Executive operation of patients with diseases affecting the circuit frontoestriado, such as psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, among others) or neurological disease (Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal dementia and vascular dementia" (, entre otras). "


You can read another articles like Dementia Definition, Dementia Diagnosis, Dementia Strategy, Activities For People With Dementia.

dementia test
early dementia
test for dementia