Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM), UPMC UMRS 1127, Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Paris, France; Neurology department, Memory and Aging center, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, AP-HP, Paris, France.
Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM), UPMC UMRS 1127, Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Paris, France.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Aug;117:371-378. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.06.022. Epub 2018 Jun 26.
Patients with neurodegenerative diseases affecting the frontal lobes have difficulties in categorization tasks, such as the similarity tasks. They give two types of unusual response to the question: "In what way are an orange and a banana alike?", either a differentiation ("one is yellow, the other is orange") or a concrete similarity ("they are sweet").
To characterize the categorization deficit of frontal patients and develop a short diagnostic tool to assess the nature of these difficulties.
We analyzed the responses provided by frontal and non-frontal neurodegenerative patients in a novel verbal similarity task (SimiCat). We included 40 frontal patients with behavioral variant fronto-temporal dementia (bvFTD) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), 23 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 41 healthy matched controls. Responses that did not correspond to the expected taxonomic category (e.g.: fruits) were considered as errors.
All patients groups were impaired at the SimiCat test compared to controls. Differentiation errors were specific to frontal patients. Receiver operating characteristic analyses showed that a cut-off of two differentiation errors or more achieved 85% sensitivity of 100% specificity to discriminate bvFTD from AD. A short version of the test (<5 min) showed similar discriminative validity as the full version.
Differentiation responses were specific to frontal patients. The SimiCat demonstrates good discriminative validity to differentiate between bvFTD and AD. The short version of the test is a promising diagnostic tool that will need validation in future studies.
影响额叶的神经退行性疾病患者在分类任务（如相似性任务）中存在困难。他们对以下问题有两种不同寻常的回答方式：“橙子和香蕉有什么相似之处？”，一种是区分（“一个是黄色，另一个是橙色”），另一种是具体相似（“它们是甜的”）。
描述额叶患者的分类缺陷，并开发一种简短的诊断工具来评估这些困难的性质。
我们分析了额叶和非额叶神经退行性疾病患者在一项新的言语相似性任务（SimiCat）中的反应。我们纳入了 40 名行为变异额颞叶痴呆（bvFTD）和进行性核上性麻痹（PSP）额叶患者、23 名阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者和 41 名健康匹配对照者。未对应预期分类类别的反应（例如：水果）被视为错误。
与对照组相比，所有患者组在 SimiCat 测试中表现受损。区分错误是额叶患者特有的。受试者工作特征曲线分析表明，区分错误达到 2 个或更多时，区分 bvFTD 和 AD 的敏感度为 85%，特异性为 100%。测试的简短版本（<5 分钟）与完整版本具有相似的区分有效性。
区分反应是额叶患者特有的。SimiCat 具有良好的区分有效性，可区分 bvFTD 和 AD。测试的简短版本是一种很有前途的诊断工具，需要在未来的研究中进行验证。
