Early detection of Alzheimer’s disease with a total score of the German CERAD

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to evaluate the diagnostic discriminability of three different global scores for the German version of the Consortium to Establish a Registry on Alzheimer's Disease-Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (CERAD-NAB). The CERAD-NAB was administered to 1100 healthy control participants [NC; Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) mean = 28.9] and 352 patients with very mild Alzheimer's disease (AD; MMSE mean = 26.1) at baseline and subsets of participants at follow-up an average of 2.4 (NC) and 1.2 (AD) years later. We calculated the following global scores: Chandler et al. 's (2005) score (summed raw scores), logistic regression on principal components analysis scores (PCA-LR), and logistic regression on demographically corrected CERAD-NAB variables (LR). Correct classifi cation rates (CCR) were compared with areas under the receiver operating characteristics curves (AUC). The CCR of the LR score (AUC = .976) exceeded that of the PCA-LR, while the PCA-LR (AUC = .968) and Chandler (AUC = .968) scores performed comparably. Retest data improved the CCR of the PCA-LR and Chandler (trend) scores. Thus, for the German CERAD-NAB, Chandler et al.'s total score provided an effective global measure of cognitive functioning, whereby the inclusion of retest data tended to improve correct classifi cation of individual cases. ( JINS , 2010, 16 , 910-920 .)

Facial Emotion Recognition Performance Differentiates Between Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia and Major Depressive Disorder

“…Based on Mini-Mental State Examination 27 and Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's DiseaseNeuropsychological Assessment Battery 28 scores, bvFTD and AD dementia patients were cognitively more impaired than MDD patients. Importantly, bvFTD and AD dementia patients showed no signs of depression (Table 1).…”

Evaluation of a Summary Score of Cognitive Performance for Use in Trials in Perioperative and Critical Care

“…It has established itself as the standard in the evaluation of dementia syndromes in memory clinics, at least throughout German-speaking Europe. The CERAD-NAB assesses a wide variety of cognitive functions, is easy to administer after appropriate training (also by non-psychologists), is standardized, and there are normative values for normal controls from the CERAD registry [6,8,19] and from several observational and longitudinal studies [20,21,22], and from 1,100 elderly Swiss individuals allowing calculation of demographically adjusted (age, gender, and education) standard scores [17,23]. Apart from English and German, the CERAD-NAB has been translated into several languages and validated in different cultures [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32].…”

“…In the word list recognition test, the patient is presented with a list of 20 printed words and asked after each word to say whether the word was one of the words s/he was presented with earlier in the word list learning test (maximum score = 10: number of true positives minus number of false positives) [6]. In accordance with Ehrensperger et al [17], we used 2 additional variables: (1) ‘intrusions’, the number of word responses given in the word list learning trials and the word list recall that were not in the original list, and ‘savings’, the proportion of correctly recalled words during the word list recall trial compared with word list learning trial 3; (2) ‘discriminability’, calculated by dividing the number of true positives by the number of true negatives in the word list recognition trial. …”

“…After a delay of 5 min (time taken for the word list recall test), the patient is asked to again recall and draw as many of the line drawings as possible (constructional praxis recall). According to Ehrensperger et al [17], ‘constructional praxis savings’ was calculated as the proportion of correctly recalled figures during the constructional praxis recall trial compared to constructional praxis.…”

“…The tests were administered in a standardized fashion in a quiet room. The unadjusted CERAD total score was calculated as described by Chandler et al [8], and demographic adjustment (for age, gender, and education) was performed according to the formula developed for the German version of the CERAD by Ehrensperger et al [17]: Chandler raw total score – (–0.391 × age + 0.886 × education + 4.447 × gender) with gender coded as male = 0 and female = 1.…”