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. 2022 Dec 30;22(1):837.
doi: 10.1186/s12888-022-04486-x.

Naming ability assessment in neurocognitive disorders: a clinician's perspective

Eliza Eleni-Zacharoula Georgiou #  1 , Savvina Prapiadou #  1 , Vasileios Thomopoulos  2 , Maria Skondra  1 , Marina Charalampopoulou  1 , Asimina Pachi  1 , Αlexandra Anagnostopoulou  1   3 , Theofanis Vorvolakos  4 , Robert Perneczky  5   6   7   8   9 , Antonios Politis  10   11 , Panagiotis Alexopoulos  12   13   14   15
Affiliations

Naming ability assessment in neurocognitive disorders: a clinician's perspective

Eliza Eleni-Zacharoula Georgiou et al. BMC Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Background: Detecting impaired naming capacity is valuable in diagnosing neurocognitive disorders (ND). A. clinical practice- oriented overview of naming tests validated in ND is not available yet. Here, features of naming tests with validated utility in ND which are open access or available for purchase are succinctly presented and compared.

Methods: Searches were carried out across Pubmed, Medline and Google Scholar. Additional studies were identified by searching reference lists. Only peer-reviewed journal articles were eligible. A narrative- and tabullar synthesis was used to summarize different aspects of the naming assessment instruments used in patients with ND such as stimuli type, administration time, assessment parameters and accessibility. Based on computational word frequency calculations, the tests were compared in terms of the average frequency of their linguistic content.

Results: Twelve naming tests, relying either on visual or auditory stimuli have been validated in ND. Their content and administration time vary between three and 60 items and one and 20 minutes, respectively. The average frequency of the words of each considered test was two or lower, pointing to low frequency of most items. In all but one test, scoring systems are exclusively based on correctly named items. Seven instruments are open access and four are available in more than one language.

Conclusions: Gaining insights into naming tests' characteristics may catalyze the wide incorporation of those with short administration time but high diagnostic accuracy into the diagnostic workup of ND at primary healthcare and of extensive, visual or auditory ones into the diagnostic endeavors of memory clinics, as well as of secondary and tertiary brain healthcare settings.

Keywords: Dementia; Major and mild neurocognitive disorder; Word-finding; anomia; dysnomia.

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Conflict of interest statement

PA is a member of the editorial board of BMC psychiatry. There has been no significant financial support for this work That could have influenced its outcome.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The neuroanatomical pathways involved in the stages of recognizing, processing and executing the output of a stimulus in the multifaceted naming process. The figure was created with BioRender.com
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Flow diagram of database and supplementary search and screening results
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Proportions of words of different frequencies of naming tests that have been validated in neurocognitive disorders
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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