The usefulness of the INECO Frontal Screening in Focal Frontal lesions and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTDbv)

TERESA TORRALVA; MARÍA ROCA; EZEQUIEL GLEICHGERRCHT; FACUNDO MANES

Honolulu

Encuentro; 63rd AAN 2011 Annual Meeting; 2011

American Academy of Neurology

OBJECTIVE: The goal of our study was to test the usefulness of the INECO Frontal Screening (IFS) (Torralva et al. 2009) in the detection of frontal dysfunction in a group of behavioral variant Frontotemporal Dementia (bv-FTD) and a group of focal frontal lesion patients. BACKGROUND: Several cognitive screening tools have desirable diagnostic and statistical properties but few have been designed to specifically assess frontal functioning. As evidence of the intrinsic difficulties that arise with the development of such tools, various screening batteries that have attempted to measure executive dysfunction, fail to exhibit reasonable psychometric properties. DESIGN/METHODS: 22 patients diagnosed with bvFTD, 21 patients with frontal lesions and 26 age, gender-, and education-matched controls were assessed with the IFS. Their performances were compared on each subtest as well as the total score using one-way ANOVAs with Bonferroni post-hoc comparisons when appropriate. RESULTS: Except for the motor inhibitory control task (p = .97), groups differed significantly on the total score as well as every subtest (p < .001) of the IFS. In all of these cases, bvFTD patients performed significantly worse than both controls (p < .001) and frontal lesion patients (p < .01). Frontal patients showed a significantly worse performance than controls only on the IFS total score (p < .001) as well as the Abstraction Capacity subtest (p < .001) and the Verbal Inhibitory Control subtest (p < .001). Using the 25-point cut-off from the original validation in bvFTD, 64% of the frontal lobe patients were accurately identified as having an executive dysfunction. CONCLUSIONS: The IFS is a brief and specific tools for the detection of early executive dysfunction, our results reveal that the IFS is sensitive in detecting the characteristic frontal deficits found both in focal frontal lesions and in a neurodegenerative disease such as bvFTD.