Detección precoz del deterioro del lenguaje oral en el adulto mayor con déficit cognitivo: resultados de un estudio piloto en la población colombiana

Background and objective

The NEUROBEL is a short test for the psycholinguistic evaluation of language comprehension and production impairment in older adults. The utility of this instrument has been primarily tested in the Spanish population. The NEUROBEL consists of tasks that assess comprehension through phoneme discrimination tasks, auditory lexical decision, spoken word-picture matching, and sentence comprehension. Additionally, it evaluates language production through repetition tasks, object naming, action naming, and sentence completion. This study aims to investigate the utility of the NEUROBEL in detecting oral language deficits related to cognitive impairment in the Colombian population.

Method

Eighty-two monolingual older adults, aged 59 to 92 years, participated, including 23 men. Of the total sample, 26 participants met the clinical criteria for early Alzheimer's disease, and 25 for mild cognitive impairment, according to the Global Deterioration Scale. The remaining 31 participants served as the control group.

Results

The results showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's Alpha=.81) and a high bivariate Pearson correlation with the MMSE (r=.85; P<.001).

Conclusion

Differences were observed among the three groups in the total scale score. In conclusion, the NEUROBEL proves to be a useful tool for detecting language difficulties in patients with suspected AD (Alzheimer Dessease) and MCI (Mild Cognitive Impairment).