ArticleBrain communications2023
Verbal fluency tests assess global cognitive status but have limited diagnostic differentiation: evidence from a large-scale examination of six neurodegenerative diseases.
Article in Brain communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Item-Level Analysis of Category Fluency Test Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Studies of Normal and Neurologically Abnormal Ageing.Neuropsychology review · 2025Pooled it
- Effect of combined physical-cognitive training on the functional and cognitive capacity of older people with mild cognitive impairment: a randomized controlled trial.BMC medicine · 2024Trial
- Factors associated with the risk of falls and their relationship with cognitive function in older adults with cognitive impairment: a cross-sectional study.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Longitudinal Cognitive Function in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy-A Review of the Evidence for Progression.Movement disorders clinical practice · 2026Review
- Brief tests for the assessment of language-executive functions: normative data for the Italian population.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Lexical and clinical predictors of verbal fluency interword intervals preceding cognitive impairment.Neuropsychologia · 2026Article
- Updated Italian norms for the Paired-Associate Learning Test (PALT).Aging clinical and experimental research · 2026Article
- Category fluency and creative potential in semantic aphasia.Journal of neuropsychology · 2026Article
- Web-Based Application for Cognitive and Functional Assessments in Dementia Screening: Mixed Methods, User-Centered Development Approach.JMIR human factors · 2026Article
- Cognitive Function as a Predictor of Incident Hypertension in Hispanic/Latino Adults: Results From the Community Health Study/Study of Latinos.Hypertension (Dallas, Tex. : 1979) · 2026Article
- Reduced intra-frontal functional connectivity during a verbal fluency task in depressed individuals with autistic traits: an fNIRS study.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- The evolution of phonemic verbal fluency test: bridging tradition with contemporary insights.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Development of language composites for enhanced sensitivity to multiple plasma biomarkers.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2025Article
- The association between total, animal-based, and plant-based protein intake and cognitive decline in older adults.European journal of nutrition · 2025Article
- A cognitive multiplex network approach to investigate mental navigation and predict high-level cognition.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Effects of the combined letter fluency task on frontal cortex regional and dynamic oxygenation patterns.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Investigating the relationship between cognitive impairment and brain white matter tracts using diffusion tensor imaging in patients with prolactinoma.Journal of endocrinological investigation · 2025Article
- Lexical retrieval in fluent and nonfluent aphasia: a network analysis of verbal fluency data.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cholinergic white matter pathways integrity in prodromal and early manifest Lewy body disease.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Multivariate word properties in fluency tasks reveal markers of Alzheimer's dementia.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2024Article
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Abstract
Verbal fluency is widely used as a clinical test, but its utility in differentiating between neurodegenerative dementias and progressive aphasias, and from healthy controls, remains unclear. We assessed whether various measures of fluency performance could differentiate between Alzheimer's disease, behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia, non-fluent and semantic variants of primary progressive aphasia, progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal syndrome and healthy controls. Category and letter fluency tasks were administered to 33 controls and 139 patients at their baseline clinical visit. We assessed group differences for total number of words produced, psycholinguistic word properties and associations between production order and exemplar psycholinguistic properties. Receiver operating characteristic curves determined which measure could best discriminate patient groups and controls. The total word count distinguished controls from all patient groups, but neither this measure nor the word properties differentiated the patient groups. Receiver operating characteristic curves revealed that, when comparing controls to patients, the strongest discriminators were total word count followed by word frequency. Word frequency was the strongest discriminator for semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia versus other groups. Fluency word counts were associated with global severity as measured by Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination Revised. Verbal fluency is an efficient test for assessing global brain-cognitive health but has limited utility in differentiating between cognitively and anatomically disparate patient groups. This outcome is consistent with the fact that verbal fluency requires many different aspects of higher cognition and language.
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