Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Málaga, Spain.
Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, University of Granada, Spain.
Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2023 Nov 6;32(6):2615-2629. doi: 10.1044/2023_AJSLP-23-00071. Epub 2023 Sep 1.
The NeuroBel is a short test that can detect cognitive decline using language tasks. This study replicated previous research using larger clinical samples from three Spanish-speaking countries.
Eight tasks were used to analyze verbal language functioning using a psycholinguistic approach. A total of 232 elderly, monolingual Spanish speakers from Spain, Cuba, and Colombia participated in this study. Of these, 76 had Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the initial phase, 75 had mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 81 did not exhibit cognitive impairment (healthy controls).
Significant differences were observed among the three clinical groups. The participants with AD and the participants with MCI had significantly lower NeuroBel scores than the control group on most of the tasks. However, repetition (in AD vs. MCI) and auditory lexical decision (in MCI vs. control) tasks were not significant in Tukey's post hoc tests. Discriminant analysis showed that 80.6% of the participants were correctly classified into the original groups and revealed the tasks that were the best and worst for differentiating among groups. The receiver-operating characteristic curves showed high sensitivity for AD and MCI. The area under the curve was .97 in the contrast of AD versus MCI + controls, .96 in the determination of overall cognitive decline (AD + MCI vs. controls), and .93 in the contrast of MCI and control groups.
This study confirmed that the NeuroBel is a suitable test for detecting cognitive decline based on language impairment in Spanish-speaking elderly people.
NeuroBel 是一项简短的测试，可通过语言任务检测认知能力下降。本研究使用来自三个西班牙语国家的更大临床样本复制了先前的研究。
使用心理语言学方法分析言语语言功能，共 8 项任务。共有 232 名来自西班牙、古巴和哥伦比亚的讲西班牙语的老年单语者参与了这项研究。其中，76 人处于阿尔茨海默病（AD）初始阶段，75 人患有轻度认知障碍（MCI），81 人无认知障碍（健康对照组）。
在三个临床组之间观察到显著差异。AD 组和 MCI 组的参与者在大多数任务中的 NeuroBel 评分均明显低于对照组。然而，在 Tukey 事后检验中，重复（AD 与 MCI 之间）和听觉词汇判断（MCI 与对照组之间）任务不显著。判别分析表明，80.6%的参与者被正确分类到原始组中，并揭示了区分组间的最佳和最差任务。受试者工作特征曲线显示对 AD 和 MCI 具有高灵敏度。AD 与 MCI + 对照组对比的曲线下面积为.97，总体认知下降的确定（AD + MCI 与对照组）为.96，MCI 和对照组对比为.93。
本研究证实，NeuroBel 是一种适合检测西班牙语老年人语言障碍导致认知能力下降的测试。
