Spanish Version of the Mini-Linguistic State Examination for the Diagnosis of Primary Progressive Aphasia

Abstract

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome with three main clinical variants: non-fluent, semantic, and logopenic. Clinical diagnosis and accurate classification are challenging and often time-consuming. The Mini-Linguistic State Examination (MLSE) has been recently developed as a short language test to specifically assess language in neurodegenerative disorders.

Objective: Our aim was to adapt and validate the Spanish version of MLSE for PPA diagnosis.

Methods: Cross-sectional study involving 70 patients with PPA and 42 healthy controls evaluated with the MLSE. Patients were independently diagnosed and classified according to comprehensive cognitive evaluation and advanced neuroimaging.

Results: Internal consistency was 0.758. The influence of age and education was very low. The area under the curve for discriminating PPA patients and healthy controls was 0.99. Effect sizes were moderate-large for the discrimination between PPA and healthy controls. Motor speech, phonology, and semantic subscores discriminated between the three clinical variants. A random forest classification model obtained an F1-score of 81%for the three PPA variants.

Conclusion: Our study provides a brief and useful language test for PPA diagnosis, with excellent properties for both clinical routine assessment and research purposes.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; frontotemporal dementia; neuropsychological; primary progressive aphasia.