Differentiating Vascular Dementia from Alzhemer’s Disease with Brief Cognitive Tests

Abstract Introduction. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) are the most common causes of dementia in the elderly. The aim of this study was to investigate the diagnostic value of brief cognitive tests investigate the diagnostic value of brief cognitive tests in differentiating vascular dementia from Alzheimer’s disease. Methods. Fifteen patients with mild VaD, 15 patients with probable AD and 30 healthy controls, matched for age, education and dementia severity, were submitted to the following cognitive tests: clock drawing (free drqawing and copy), category of letter fluency, delayed recall test of figures and the EXIT 25 battery. Results. VaD patients performed worse than AD patients in category fluency (p=0.014), letter fluency (p=0.043) and CLOX 2 (p=0.023), while AD cases performed worse than VaD patients in delayed recall (p=0.013). However, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for these tests displayed low sensitivity and specificity for the differential diagnosis between VaD and AD. Conclusions. Altough the performance of VaD and AD patients was significantly different in some cognitive tests, the value of such instruments in differentiating VaD from AD proved to be very limited.