Study On The Feasibility Of Using A Chinese Character Writing Scale To Distinguish Amnestic-MCI

Alzheimer's disease(AD)is the most common form of the dementia,and AD is a progressive,irreversible,and chronic syndrome.AD chronic damage higher cortical functions,is including memory,visual spatial ability,cognition,emotion and language ability.Until now,it has been very difficult to detect AD early and accurately.As the prodromal stage of AD,amnestic mild cognitive impairment(a-MCI)is geted the great attention in recent years.How to use objective and effective method to evaluate the degree of AD patients is one of the difficulties faced by the medical profession,and neuropsychological examination is the clinical commonly used evaluation methods.Both cross-sectional study and prospective studies have confirmed that the neural mental cognitive scale play an importance role in evaluation early a-MCI and AD patients.Most neuropsychological scales on aphasia are based on spelling languages,such as English,leaving very few scales in native Chinese.The majority of neuropsychological scales used in China are derived from the scales in English(to be translated into Chinese),including the Mini-Mental State Exam(MMSE),Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale.But some of the items involved in language function evaluation,is only applicable to patients with phonetic languages,especially English speaking participants,is not suitable for Chinese which speak Chinese and write Chinese characters.Therefore,the study of specialized Chinese writing diagnostic scales for diagnosis Chinese AD patients is very valuable.The Aphasia Battery of Chinese(ABC;developed by the Neuropsychological Research Laboratory of the Affiliated Hospital of Beijing Medical University to check the aphasia in China)was used in this research.The CCWS was extracted from the sixth part(the part of verifying the degree of logagraphia)of the ABC,which is used to detect the relevance between dysgraphia and AD.The ability of the CCWS to distinguish a-MCI was compared with ADAS and MMSE,to study the feasibility of using CCWS to distinguish a-MCI.In order to achieve the goal of the above:First,this experiment using t-test to test total scores of CCWS scale between three groups to preliminary validation if we can use total score to distinguish a-MCI,the result is verification by t-test based on total scores: the total scores of the CCWS increased successively in the order of the AD,a-MCI,and NC groups,and there were significant differences between every two groups.The total scores of the MMSE in the NC group and the a-MCI group were significantly higher than the score in the AD group.Although the total score of the MMSE in the NC group was higher than the a-MCI group,there was no significant difference.The scores of the ADAS decreased successively in the order of the AD,a-MCI,and NC groups,and there were highly significant differences between every two groups.Prompt,in terms of total score,CCWS can be used to distinguish a-MCI.Second,we tested the CCWS for distinguishing a-MCI from NC and AD,and used several different data analysis methods to compare the classification accuracy with ADAS and MMSE.Two classification tasks were addressed(NC/a-MCI and a-MCI/AD).Based on the experiments,the results were promising and we conclude that the classification accuracy of the CCWS in distinguishing between healthy patients and patients with a-MCI was higher than the MMSE scale and similar with ADAS scale.The most sensitive sub-items were the dictation-Chinese character component,the dictation-short sentence,writing at pictures,and spontaneous writing;the other components did not result in a relative change.These experiments suggested that the CCWS could be applied as a screening tool for a-MCI among Chinese-writing people.And the most sensitive sub-items got in experiment can be used in the next step to create a set of scale to evaluate writing ability in patients with AD.