Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test as a tool for diagnosis of Mild cognitive impairment

Background. Previous research suggests that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) manifest more "false alarm" (FA) responses in recognition memory tests than patients with Huntington disease (Delis et al., 1991), minimal cognitive impairment (MCI) or normal controls (Greenaway et al., 2006). It has been shown that 50% of patients with MCI develop dementia within 5 years (Gauthier et al., 2006). An early diagnosis of MCI when treatment is most effective is thus warranted. The objective of this study was to characterize recognition memory error patterns in patients with MCI in order to predict an incipient AD. Methods. 33 MCI patients whose MMSE scores were between 25 and 27 participated in the study and were compared to 97 TLE patients who underwent full neuropsychological evaluations. FA measure was applied to analyze the recognition memory errors on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). Results. According to the independent sample t-test, MCI patients demon strated significantly more FA errors than TLE patients (p=0.01). A significant negative correlation between the number of FA mistakes and the score on the MMSE was found in the MCI group (p=0.04). Conclusions: The present findings suggest that a high number of FA errors, in a framework of a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation, may be helpful in an early diagnosis of MCI.