Discriminative validity of an abbreviated Semantic Verbal Fluency Test

• Autor(a) principal: Herrera-García,José David
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Rego-García,Iago, Guillén-Martínez,Virginia, Carrasco-García,María, Valderrama-Martín,Carmen, Vílchez-Carrillo,Rosa, López-Alcalde,Samuel, Carnero-Pardo,Cristóbal
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Dementia & Neuropsychologia
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1980-57642019000200203
• topic: semantic verval fluency; diagnostic utility; Alzheimer’s disease; brief cognitive test

ABSTRACT. Semantic verbal fluency (SVF) is one of the most widely used tests for cognitive assessment due to its diagnostic utility (DU). Objective: our objective is to evaluate the DU to detect cognitive impairment (CI) of a short version of the SVF applied in 30 seconds (SVF1-30). Methods: a prospective sample of consecutive patients evaluated in a Neurology Unit between December 2016 and December 2017 were assessed with the Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), 30-second and 60-second SVF tests (animals), and the Fototest, which includes a fluency task of people’s names. The DU for CI was evaluated by the area under the ROC curve and effect size (“d” Cohen). Results: the study included 1012 patients (256 with CI, 395 with dementia). SVF1-30 shows a good correlation with GDS stage. The DU of SVF1-30 is identical to that of the classical version, applied in 60 seconds, (SVFtotal) for CI (0.89 ± 0.01; p > 0.50), and shows no significant difference for dementia (0.85 ± 0.01 vs. 0.86 ± 0.01, p > 0.15). Discussion: the DU of SVF1-30 is similar to that of the SVFtotal, allowing a reduction in examination time with no loss of discriminative capacity.