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Estimation of Premorbid Intelligence in Spanish People with the Word Accentuation Test and Its Application to the Diagnosis of Dementia

1997; Elsevier BV; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1006/brcg.1997.0877

1090-2147

Teodoro del Ser, Juan Ignacio González-Montalvo, Susana Martı́nez-Espinosa, Carlos Delgado-Villapalos, Fẽlix Bermejo,

Chronic Disease Management Strategies

The Word Accentuation Test assesses the accentuation of 30 infrequent Spanish words written without the accentuation mark and is an easy-to-use tool for estimating premorbid intelligence of Spanish-speaking people. Its intraobserver (0.97) and interobserver (0.93) reliabilities and its correlation with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (.837) and Raven's Progressive Matrices (.655) are high, offering a good prediction of general intelligence. It is resistant to mental deterioration; 20 demented and 40 controls matched by sex, age, and education obtained similar scores. The discrepancies between current and predicted scores in Raven's scale can diagnose mild-moderate dementia with 0.79 accuracy (sensitivity, 0.78; specificity, 0.82).