Symposia 14 Program Schedule
02/17/2024
09:00 am - 10:30 am
Room: West Side Ballroom - Salon 1
Symposia 14: Advances in cognitive screening and neuropsychological assessment of cognitive decline and dementia in individuals with low education/low literacy levels
Simposium #2
Searching for the ideal selection of cognitive screening tasks for early detection of cognitive decline in older individuals with low literacy: findings from older populations in southern Spain
Unai Diaz-Orueta, Maynooth University, Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland
Category: Assessment/Psychometrics/Methods (Adult)
Keyword 1: academic achievement
Keyword 2: aging (normal)
Keyword 3: cognitive screening
Objective:
A cognitive screening protocol was developed to capture cognitive performance in widely used cognitive screening tasks (educationally ‘biased’ tasks) as well as in a set of matching tasks that are expected to be unbiased for literacy levels (Pellicer-Espinosa & Diaz-Orueta, 2021). The goal of this study was to uncover the most suitable selection of cognitive tasks to improve the differentiation between performance deficits linked to cognition versus defective performance due to low literacy levels.
Participants and Methods:
Participants were 78 older adults (50% female) from the community attending specialized care facilities in a hospital setting in southern Spain. The protocol comprised a brief set of questions to gather information about the education level. As a routine part of the screening, the DSM-V neurocognitive disorders criteria, the Global Deterioration Scale and the MMSE were administered. For the set of cognitive tasks, both phonetic (letter P) and semantic fluency (animals), the BNT-15, calculus (subtractions of 7), clock-drawing test (command, copy and trace versions), and Digits Forward and Backwards were administered. Additionally, drawings from the ACE-III (infinite loop and cube), Five Digits Test, Fototest and Verbal Fluency for names (opposite and same gender) were administered as low literacy appropriate tasks. Clock Reading Test was used as a contrast to evaluate performance in the Clock Drawing Test.
Results:
Results will be presented on the most appropriate tasks to accurately detect defective cognitive performance in older adults with low literacy levels. Results showed a higher adequacy of certain cognitive tasks to better distinguish between low scoring attributable to cognitive performance and that attributable to low literacy levels. Rather than relying on specific full cognitive tests, a selection of cognitive tasks extracted from different tests appeared to add accuracy when trying to capture cognitive performance in a more reliable way.
Conclusions:
A re-definition of approaches to cognitive screening of individuals with low literacy levels is essential, and a higher focus on benefits provided by selected individual cognitive tasks, rather than established full global cognition screening tests, is required, in order to accurately identify performance linked to cognitive decline versus performance linked to low literacy.
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