The Minilinguistic State Examination for Primary Progressive Aphasia: validity evidences for the Argentinean version

VIVAS, L.; REDONDO, S.; GARAVAGLIA, M.; ANDREOTTI, D.; LINARES, N.; MATAR, L.; PAOLANTONIO, M.P.

Amsterdam

Congreso; Alzheimer´s Association International Conference; 2023

Alzheimer´s Association

Background:This work presents a new brief language assessment tool for PrimaryProgressive aphasia: the Minilinguistic State Examination (MLSE). Ithas been developed with the intention to have equivalent version indifferent countries. We translated and adapted the test toArgentinean Spanish. Here we present the psychometric properties ofthe Argentinean Spanish version of the MLSE. Method:The sample comprised 29 aphasic patients from different etiologiesand 94 healthy community-dwelling adults. All of them were nativeArgentinean Spanish speaking. The Argentinean MLSE was administeredas well as the following equivalent subtests with validatedArgentinean versions in order to analyze the concurrent validitythrough a Spearman´s Rho correlation coefficient: the Boston AphasiaBattery, the BEA (Batería de Evaluación de la Afasia), Pyramids andPalm tree test and Repeat and Point. Score´s reliability wasanalyzed according to K-R 20 coefficient for each kind of possibleerror: motor, phonologic, semantic and working memory. Threeindependent clinicians scored a sub-group of 16 patients in order todetermine interraters reliability. Krippendorff´s alpha wascalculated.Result:All correlations with the equivalent tasks were statisticallysignificant except for semantic association task that was nearstatistical significance (p = .061). Score´s reliability for motorerrors was .825, for phonological errors .889, for semantic .841 andfor working memory .874. Krippendorff´s alpha obtained for the totalMLSE score was .877, while the following values were obtained foreach type of error identified in the MLSE: motor = .398; phonological= .707; semantic = .729; syntactic = .831; working memory = .539;omissions = .672. Conclusion:All these analyses provide evidence of validity of the scores of thetest and suggest that it can be used with confidence by clinicians.They also showed in general acceptable interrater reliability.However, some clarifications should be added to the motor and workingmemory scoring guide in order to avoid interrater´s divergencies, asthe obtained values were low.