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SAND: a Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration. Development and normative data

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Abstract

Language assessment has a critical role in the clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, in particular, in the case of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). The current diagnostic criteria (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011) identify three main variants on the basis of clinical features and patterns of brain atrophy. Widely accepted tools to diagnose, clinically classify, and follow up the heterogeneous language profiles of PPA are still lacking. In this study, we develop a screening battery, composed of nine tests (picture naming, word and sentence comprehension, word and sentence repetition, reading, semantic association, writing and picture description), following the recommendations of current diagnostic guidelines and taking into account recent research on the topic. All tasks were developed with consideration of the psycholinguistic factors that can affect performance, with the aim of achieving sensitivity to the language deficit to which each task was relevant, and to allow identification of the selective characteristic impairments of each PPA variant. Normative data on 134 Italian subjects pooled across homogeneous subgroups for age, sex, and education are reported. Although further work is still needed, this battery represents a first step towards a concise multilingual standard language examination, a fast and simple tool to help clinicians and researchers in the diagnosis of PPA.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Cristiano Chesi for his helpful comments in the construction of sentence comprehension task, Caterina Balduzzi for her help in collecting controls’ data and in scoring, and Monica Consonni and Laura Sampietro for their assistance in data management. This study was supported by the MRC Research Grant: Ref MR/N025881/1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NEtS, Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS—Pavia, Pavia, Italia

    Eleonora Catricalà, Petronilla Battista, Veronica Boschi & Stefano F. Cappa

  2. Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano, Italia

    Elena Gobbi & Valentina Esposito

  3. Unità di Malattie Neurodegenerative, Dipartimento di medicina di base, neuroscienze e organi del senso, Università di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italia

    Petronilla Battista

  4. NEUROFARBA- Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Psicologia, Area del Farmaco e Salute del Bambino, Università di Firenze, Firenze, Italia

    Petronilla Battista & Sandro Sorbi

  5. Unità di Neurologia, Dipartimento di scienze cliniche e sperimentali, Università di Brescia, Brescia, Italia

    Antonio Miozzo

  6. SBSC - Dipartimento di Scienze Biomediche Sperimentali e Cliniche, Università di Firenze, Firenze, Italia

    Cristina Polito

  7. Facoltà di Medicina e Chirurgia, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italia

    Sofia Cuoco & Paolo Barone

  8. IRCCS S. Giovanni di Dio Fatebenefratelli, Brescia, Italia

    Stefano F. Cappa

  9. Neuroscience Research Centre, St George’s—University of London, London, UK

    Peter Garrard

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  1. Eleonora Catricalà
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  2. Elena Gobbi
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  3. Petronilla Battista
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  4. Antonio Miozzo
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  5. Cristina Polito
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  8. Sofia Cuoco
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Correspondence to Eleonora Catricalà.

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Catricalà, E., Gobbi, E., Battista, P. et al. SAND: a Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration. Development and normative data. Neurol Sci 38, 1469–1483 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-017-3001-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-017-3001-y

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