The Ege Agraphia Test Battery for Identifying the Writing Disorders in Cases with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to create an agraphia test battery specific to Turkish language, to obtain normative data for the performance and error types of this test and to demonstrate its success in detecting cognitive disorders in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) cases that can't be diagnosed by formal neuropsychological tests due to the fact that writing is a complex function.
Method: For this purpose, 20 healthy control (HC) subjects, 20 MCI cases and 20 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients with Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) of 1 were evaluated with Ege Agraphia Test Battery.
Results: Significant differences between the performance points and the error types of HC subjects, MCI cases and AD patients were obtained. As the cognitive impairment of the subjects in the study got worse, the writing skills also became worse revealing lower test points. Besides, some statistically significant differences between the error types of MCI cases and AD patients were found.
Conclusion: Ege Agraphia Test Battery is not only a practical test, but also is the first defined agraphia test specific for Turkish language. Writing disorders in cases with MCI support the view that MCI is a transition period for AD. Further studies are required to increase the test data and proper rearrangements of the test battery.