Predictive value for cerebrospinal fluid Alzheimer's disease profile of different measures of verbal episodic memory in patients with MCI

: Neuropsychological evidence of memory impairment represents the main feature of the clinical onset of typical Alzheimer's disease (AD). Rey's Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) and Logical Memory (LM) are two tests both assessing verbal episodic memory, widely used in clinical practice. Our aim was to investigate the added value of their combined use in predicting cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) AD biomarkers positivity in a retrospective consecutive series of patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). 169 MCI patients were included. For all of them neuropsychological assessment and CSF analysis were available. According to CSF A/T/(N) profile, 109 were defined as MCI due to AD (A+T+), and 60 were non-AD MCI (A-T-). Logistic regression model and receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves were analyzed to evaluate the discriminatory power of single and combined sub-measures between AD and non-AD patients. The combination of RAVLT-del with LM could acceptably discriminate the two groups (AUC: 0.69, CI 95% 0.617-0.761, sens: 0.75, spec. 0.58, p < 0.001), while the single tests did not show sufficient discriminative performance. Our study shows that the combination of RAVLT delayed recall with LM better predicts the biological AD diagnosis (A+T+), showing a good discriminative power between MCI-AD from non-AD MCI. Since RAVLT and LM assess different components of verbal episodic memory, they should be considered as complementary, rather than interchangeable, tests.