Diagnostic Value of Time-Constrained Naming Test in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

Background: Naming difficulties have recently garnered more interest in elderly individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We anticipate that naming tests with the consideration of response time can provide more informative and distinct neuropsychological profiles of individuals with MCI. Methods: Naming tests were administered to 76 elderly individuals with MCI and 149 healthy elderly (HE). We analyzed the impact of MCI on naming performance and occurrence of “delayed” response. We also validated the predictive power of naming tests with a time-constrained scoring system. Results: MCI participants performed poorer on the noun naming test than HE participants (p = 0.014). MCI was significantly associated with the occurrence of “delayed” response on the noun (odds ratio [OR] = 3.57; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.78-7.17) and verb naming tests (OR = 4.66; 95% CI = 2.07-10.46). The time-constrained naming scores were significantly better able to distinguish the MCI from the HE group than the conventional spontaneous naming score on both the noun (p < 0.001) and verb (p = 0.002) naming tests. Conclusions: Our findings broaden the knowledge related to the naming ability in individuals with MCI, with respect to the response time. We also confirmed the validity of the naming tests by applying the “delayed” responses as supplementary assessments in the diagnosis of MCI.

Assessment of Language Function in Older Mandarin-Speaking Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment using Multifaceted Language Tests

“…This pattern of impairment suggests a common underlying difficulty in effortful lexical and semantic processing in individuals with aMCI [18,21]. This finding is consistent with those of studies either employing a comprehensive language test battery [32,33] or focusing on a single aspect of language function (e.g., [17,19,39,70,71]).…”

Picture-Naming Performance in Persian-Speaking Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease

“…A more significant result of the current study was distinguishing patients with MCI and normal subjects despite the easy and fast use of the method. Therefore, it is suggested that the technique be used to identify MCI and AD at early stages (29).…”

EWA-DB, Slovak Database of Speech Affected by Neurodegenerative Diseases

“…Nouns and verbs engage different brain areas. Lexical retrieval of nouns is engaging left temporal areas and verb retrieval is engaging left frontal areas 44, 45 . This could be one of possible explanations for difficulties of verb production in PD.…”

“…The reason is that naming processes for verbs and nouns are different. As explained by Hwang et al 44 , verbs and nouns belong to separate grammatical classes and the difference is also in terms of their semantic representation as nouns refer to objects, while verbs refer to actions. Nouns and verbs engage different brain areas.…”