The Gesture Imitation in Alzheimer's Disease Dementia and Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment.

BACKGROUND

Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD) has become an important health problem in the world. Visuospatial deficits are considered to be an early symptom besides memory disorder.

OBJECTIVES

The gesture imitation test was devised to detect ADD and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI).

METHODS

A total of 117 patients with ADD, 118 with aMCI, and 95 normal controls were included in this study. All participants were administered our gesture imitation test, the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), the Clock Drawing Test (CDT), and the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR).

RESULTS

Patients with ADD performed worse than normal controls on global scores and had a lower success rate on every item (p < 0.001). The area under the curve (AUC) for the global scores when comparing the ADD and control groups was 0.869 (p < 0.001). Item 4 was a better discriminator with a sensitivity of 84.62% and a specificity of 67.37%. The AUC for the global scores decreased to 0.621 when applied to the aMCI and control groups (p = 0.002). After controlling for age and education, the gesture imitation test scores were positively correlated with the MMSE (r = 0.637, p < 0.001), the MoCA (r = 0.572, p < 0.001), and the CDT (r = 0.514, p < 0.001) and were negatively correlated with the CDR scores (r = -0.558, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

The gesture imitation test is an easy, rapid tool for detecting ADD, and is suitable for the patients suspected of mild ADD and aMCI in outpatient clinics.