ABSTRACT

Background: Written language impairments are common in Alzheimer’s disease and reduced syntactic complexity in written discourse has been observed decades before the onset of dementia. The validity of average dependency distance (ADD), a measure of syntactic complexity, in cognitive decline needs to be studied further to evaluate its clinical relevance.

Aims: The aim of the study was to determine whether ADD is associated with levels of cognitive impairment in memory clinic patients.

Methods & procedures: We analyzed written texts collected in clinical practice from 114 participants with subjective cognitive impairment, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease during routine assessment at a memory clinic. ADD was measured using automated analysis methods consisting of a syntactic parser and a part-of-speech tagger.

Outcomes & results: Our results show a significant association between ADD and levels of cognitive impairment, using ordinal logistic regression models.

Conclusion: These results suggest that ADD is clinically relevant with regard to levels of cognitive impairment and indicate a diagnostic potential for ADD in cognitive assessment.

摘要

背景：书面语言障碍在阿尔茨海默病中很常见，并且在痴呆症发作前几十年就已经观察到书面话语中句法复杂性的降低。需要进一步研究平均依赖距离（ADD）（句法复杂性的度量）在认知衰退中的有效性，以评估其临床相关性。

目的：该研究的目的是确定 ADD 是否与记忆临床患者的认知障碍水平相关。

方法和程序：我们分析了在记忆诊所常规评估期间从 114 名主观认知障碍、轻度认知障碍和阿尔茨海默病参与者的临床实践中收集的书面文本。ADD 是使用自动分析方法测量的，该方法由句法解析器和词性标注器组成。

结果和结果：我们的结果使用序数逻辑回归模型显示 ADD 与认知障碍水平之间存在显着关联。

结论：这些结果表明，ADD 与认知障碍水平具有临床相关性，并表明 ADD 在认知评估中具有诊断潜力。