‘Pragmatic tests may lead to early diagnosis of dementia’

Kolkata: Impairment of language skills can indicate the onset of dementia. Deploying pragmatic tests, along with existing diagnostic checks, might increase the probability of early diagnosis before it was too late, pointed out findings of a group of researchers, including two from the state-run Bangur Institute of Neurosciences (BIN) Kolkata. The findings have been published in the Alzheimer’s & Dementia, a journal of Alzheimer’s Association.Dementia is a neurodegenerative disease that leads to loss of memory, language skills, problem-solving and other cognitive abilities. If detected early, medications and therapies can check the progress of the disease and better manage the patients’ conditions. “Dementia starts with subtle symptoms, including language and cognitive impairment in many. So, we stress early detection with pragmatic tests for timely intervention,” said professor Atanu Biswas, head of neuro-medicine dept at BIN, IPGMER, one of the authors of the paper, ‘The scope of using pragmatic language tests for early detection of dementia: A systematic review of investigations using figurative language’, written after review of databases, articles and studies since 1970s. Linguist and cognitive scientist Modhushree Chakrabarty is the chief author of the paper, co-written by Nathaniel Klooster of Hope College in Holland, Michigan and Anjan Chatterjee from neurology dept, Pennsylvania University. Clinicians said dementia set in with symptoms, like forgetting names and words, communication problems and misplacing objects, which might come across as minor but should not be ignored. At BIN, a team, led by Chakrabarty, has developed a test battery to assess higher language ability. It picks up early signals of dementia before standard diagnostic tests. “People are tested on understanding of metaphorical and literal meanings of words and relevance of the context,” she said.