Moreno-Martínez F Javier, Ruiz Marcos, Montoro Pedro R
Departamento de Psicología Básica I, Facultad de Psicología, UNED, Madrid, Spain.
Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord. 2017;43(1-2):59-70. doi: 10.1159/000454916. Epub 2016 Dec 24.
BACKGROUND/AIMS: Category fluency tasks have been widely used to assess cognitive functioning in both clinical and experimental environments as an index of cognitive and psycholinguistic dysfunctions in dementia. Typically, a reduced group of semantic categories has been selected for neuropsychological assessment (e.g., animals, fruits or vegetables), although empirical support for the prevalence of one category among others is absent in the literature.
We provide an empirical evaluation of the ability of 14 category fluency tasks to discriminate between subjects with dementia of the Alzheimer type and healthy elderly participants. As a novelty, we used both receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and quality ROC calibrated analyses to characterize the interplay of sensitivity and specificity of every category fluency task performance as a screening tool. The use of calibrated measures provided us with a useful tool for comparing the diagnostic ability of the different categories, as well as making rankings of categories based on the quality indices of efficiency, sensitivity, and specificity.
The habitually used category of animals is far from being the most efficient one in terms of its diagnostic power to evaluate dementia.
Our study might guide the selection of suitable category fluency tasks according to the diagnostic purposes in dementia.
背景/目的：类别流畅性任务已在临床和实验环境中广泛用于评估认知功能，作为痴呆症认知和心理语言功能障碍的指标。通常，在神经心理学评估中会选择一组精简的语义类别（例如，动物、水果或蔬菜），尽管文献中缺乏关于某一类别比其他类别更普遍的实证支持。
我们对14项类别流畅性任务区分阿尔茨海默病型痴呆患者和健康老年参与者的能力进行了实证评估。新颖之处在于，我们使用了受试者工作特征（ROC）曲线和质量ROC校准分析，以表征每个类别流畅性任务表现作为筛查工具时敏感性和特异性的相互作用。校准测量的使用为我们提供了一个有用的工具，用于比较不同类别的诊断能力，以及根据效率、敏感性和特异性的质量指标对类别进行排名。
就评估痴呆症的诊断能力而言，习惯使用的动物类别远非最有效的类别。
我们的研究可能会根据痴呆症的诊断目的指导合适的类别流畅性任务的选择。
