Background: Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD) has become an important health problem in the world. Visuospatial deficits are considered to be an early symptom besides memory disorder.
Objectives: The gesture imitation test was devised to detect ADD and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI).
Methods: A total of 117 patients with ADD, 118 with aMCI, and 95 normal controls were included in this study. All participants were administered our gesture imitation test, the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), the Clock Drawing Test (CDT), and the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR).
Results: Patients with ADD performed worse than normal controls on global scores and had a lower success rate on every item (p < 0.001). The area under the curve (AUC) for the global scores when comparing the ADD and control groups was 0.869 (p < 0.001). Item 4 was a better discriminator with a sensitivity of 84.62% and a specificity of 67.37%. The AUC for the global scores decreased to 0.621 when applied to the aMCI and control groups (p = 0.002). After controlling for age and education, the gesture imitation test scores were positively correlated with the MMSE (r = 0.637, p < 0.001), the MoCA (r = 0.572, p < 0.001), and the CDT (r = 0.514, p < 0.001) and were negatively correlated with the CDR scores (r = -0.558, p < 0.001).
Conclusions: The gesture imitation test is an easy, rapid tool for detecting ADD, and is suitable for the patients suspected of mild ADD and aMCI in outpatient clinics.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; gesture imitation; mild cognitive impairment; neuropsychological test.