Researchers who administered the FRONTIER Executive Screen (FES) – a brief bedside questionnaire designed to assess verbal fluency, inhibitory control, and working memory – were able to distinguish patients with behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) from patients with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.
“FES correctly classified over 90% of study participants into healthy controls or patients with dementia (bvFTD and AD). Within patient groups, almost three-quarters of patients with dementia were correctly classified into bvFTD and AD based on the total FES score,” wrote the researchers, led by Olivier Piguet, Ph.D., of Neuroscience Research Australia, New South Wales.
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They administered the FES to 28 patients with dementia (14 with bvFTD, 14 with Alzheimer’s disease) matched for disease severity and 33 age-matched healthy controls. After adjustment, they found that a cut-off FES total score of 7 or below achieved 71% sensitivity and 73% specificity for a diagnosis of bvFTD. While the researchers noted that the screen demonstrated excellent discriminative validity from distinguishing the two groups of patients, they warned that the test is not designed to replace a comprehensive cognitive assessment, and assessing executive dysfunction in other clinical populations using the FES is not recommended.
“Our findings indicate that the combination of the FES with the [Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination–III] will improve discriminative ability between dementia syndromes; however, this result will need to be demonstrated in prospective studies. Future research will also benefit from exploring the utility of administering the FES, in conjunction with social cognition measures, with evidence that such measures can also assist with differentiating bvFTD from AD, and bvFTD from psychiatric conditions,” the researchers wrote.
They indicated that they had no conflicts of interest.
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