Abstract
To investigate the usefulness of the word fluency test (WFT) as a brief assessment for diagnosis in patients with dementia, we examined cognitive function using the category fluency test (CFT) and the letter fluency test (LFT). The subjects were 276 senile patients having amnesia as a complaint. A total of 170 could be diagnosed as having dementia, including 88 cases of Alzheimer's disease (AD), 21 of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), 5 of dementia with Lewy body (DLB), 56 of vascular dementia (VD) and 39 of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We discussed the difference in scores between the various types of dementia. In both CFT and LFT, the scores of healthy persons were higher than those of MCI. MCI score on both CFT and LFT were much higher compared with the scores of all types of dementia. The scores of CFT were higher than those of LFT in all subjects. Based on these findings, it is suggested that WFT is an efficient tool to diagnose dementia, but it is difficult to distinguish among different types of dementia.
