Performance of a Brazilian population sample in the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination: A pilot study

Abstract

Brazilian researchers and health professionals often face the challenge of having to use tests developed in foreign languages and standardized for populations of other countries, especially in the fields of Neuropsychology and Neurolinguistics. This fact promotes a feeling that some scoring systems may be inadequate for our sociocultural reality. In the present study, we describe the performance of a Brazilian population sample submitted to a translated and adapted version of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). Sixty normal volunteers (21 men and 39 women), all Portuguese native speakers, ranging in age from 15 to 78 years (average 43.7) and with an educational level of 2 to 16 years (average 9.9), were tested using a translated and adapted Portuguese version of the BDAE. Cut-off scores are suggested for our population and the performance of the Brazilian sample is compared to that of American and Colombian samples, with the results being closely similar in all tasks. We also performed a correlation analysis between age, gender and educational level and the influence of these variables on the performance of the subjects. We found no statistically significant differences between genders. Educational level correlated positively with performance, especially in the subtests involving reading and writing. There was a negative correlation between age and performance in two subtests (Visual Confrontation Naming and Sentences to Dictation), but a coexisting effect of educational level could not be ruled out.

Contribution to the evaluation of language disturbances in subcortical lesions: a piloty study

“…Our patients had lexical-semantic difficulties which could be seen in tasks such as verbal fluency and naming; eleven patients were below the percentile 10 for Brazilians in the verbal fluency subtest, despite being above the cut-off score for aphasics 22 ; ten patients were below the percentile 10 in the naming subtests. Lexical access difficulties were more evident as there were a greater number of errors in the visual confrontation than in the responsive naming task (which always has a semantic clue).…”

“…In the frontal scripts task, statistical analysis was not carried out due to the small number of patients in the T group; the patients were compared to a group of eight normal subjects using unpaired t-test, Welch corrected; in the Token Test, they were compared to a group of 17 normal subjects using the Mann Whitney test. Brazilian reference scores were used for the BDAE results 22 .…”

Normative data for the Brazilian population in the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination: influence of schooling

“…In Brazil, a country in which social differences are also extreme, it is expected that educational level may represent a powerful influence on the performance of subjects in neuropsychological tests in general (4,5). However, in the study cited above (2) we were unable to find unequivocal differences. Thus, we realized that it was necessary to increase the sample size to include different educational levels.…”

“…For this reason, we have been trying to determine the performance of the Brazilian population in tests of wide application in the diagnosis of aphasia, such as the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) (1). In a previous study, we evaluated a sample of 60 normal subjects and tried to determine which demographic variables could influence their performance in the BDAE, as well as to obtain reference values for our population (2).…”

Alterações de linguagem nas fases iniciais da doença de Alzheimer

“…No caso de dados não-paramétricos, utilizamos o sign test. As médias da população sem DA utilizadas para a comparação neste estudo foram apresentadas por Radanovic e Mansur 12 . Para o teste Kolmogorov-Smirnov foi considerado valor estatisticamente significante p< 0,05.…”