1. Remote versus face-to-face neuropsychological testing for dementia research: a comparative study in people with Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia and healthy older individuals.
- Author
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Requena-Komuro MC, Jiang J, Dobson L, Benhamou E, Russell L, Bond RL, Brotherhood EV, Greaves C, Barker S, Rohrer JD, Crutch SJ, Warren JD, and Hardy CJ
- Subjects
- Humans, Bayes Theorem, Cross-Sectional Studies, Retrospective Studies, Pandemics, Prospective Studies, Neuropsychological Tests, Frontotemporal Dementia diagnosis, Alzheimer Disease diagnosis, Alzheimer Disease psychology, COVID-19 diagnosis, Aphasia
- Abstract
Objectives: We explored whether adapting neuropsychological tests for online administration during the COVID-19 pandemic was feasible for dementia research., Design: We used a longitudinal design for healthy controls, who completed face-to-face assessments 3-4 years before remote assessments. For patients, we used a cross-sectional design, contrasting a prospective remote cohort with a retrospective face-to-face cohort matched for age/education/severity., Setting: Remote assessments were conducted using video-conferencing/online testing platforms, with participants using a personal computer/tablet at home. Face-to-face assessments were conducted in testing rooms at our research centre., Participants: The remote cohort comprised 25 patients (n=8 Alzheimer's disease (AD); n=3 behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD); n=4 semantic dementia (SD); n=5 progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA); n=5 logopenic aphasia (LPA)). The face-to-face patient cohort comprised 64 patients (n=25 AD; n=12 bvFTD; n=9 SD; n=12 PNFA; n=6 LPA). Ten controls who previously participated in face-to-face research also took part remotely., Outcome Measures: The outcome measures comprised the strength of evidence under a Bayesian framework for differences in performances between testing environments on general neuropsychological and neurolinguistic measures., Results: There was substantial evidence suggesting no difference across environments in both the healthy control and combined patient cohorts (including measures of working memory, single-word comprehension, arithmetic and naming; Bayes Factors (BF)
01 >3), in the healthy control group alone (including measures of letter/category fluency, semantic knowledge and bisyllabic word repetition; all BF01 >3), and in the combined patient cohort alone (including measures of working memory, episodic memory, short-term verbal memory, visual perception, non-word reading, sentence comprehension and bisyllabic/trisyllabic word repetition; all BF01 >3). In the control cohort alone, there was substantial evidence in support of a difference across environments for tests of visual perception (BF01 =0.0404) and monosyllabic word repetition (BF01 =0.0487)., Conclusions: Our findings suggest that remote delivery of neuropsychological tests for dementia research is feasible., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)- Published
- 2022
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