gms | German Medical Science

64. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e. V. (GMDS)

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie

08. - 11.09.2019, Dortmund

Does colour matter? A reanalysis of patterns of the digital tree drawing test for screening of early dementia

Meeting Abstract

  • Sibylle Robens - Department for Psychology and Psychotherapy, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany
  • Thomas Ostermann - Department for Psychology and Psychotherapy, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany
  • Petra Heymann - Nürtingen-Geislingen University (HfWU), Institute of Research and Development in Art Therapies, Nürtingen, Germany
  • Stephan Müller - Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany
  • Christoph Laske - Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany
  • Ulrich Elbing - Nürtingen-Geislingen University (HfWU), Institute of Research and Development in Art Therapies, Nürtingen, Germany

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie. 64. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e.V. (GMDS). Dortmund, 08.-11.09.2019. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2019. DocAbstr. 54

doi: 10.3205/19gmds133, urn:nbn:de:0183-19gmds1332

Veröffentlicht: 6. September 2019

© 2019 Robens et al.
Dieser Artikel ist ein Open-Access-Artikel und steht unter den Lizenzbedingungen der Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (Namensnennung). Lizenz-Angaben siehe http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Gliederung

Text

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), which accounts for about two-thirds of all dementia cases, is one of the most challenging and cost intensive diseases for western health care systems [1]. A variety of low threshold neuropsychological screening tests have been established to detect AD in an early stage. Due to the fact that deficits in drawing are early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, drawing tasks such as the clock drawing test (CDT) [2] have been shown to be sensitive in detecting early AD. In addition, due to impairments in visuo-constructive functions, changes in colour perception have also been reported in several studies. In reanalyzing data from a digital tree drawing test (dTDT), we aimed to answer the question if the use of colours is an important characteristic to differentiate between healthy subjects and patients with early dementia of Alzheimer’s type (eAD). This analysis is based on a sample of N=67 cognitive healthy participants (mean age 65.9 ± 10.3) and 56 patients with eAD (mean age 72.7 ± 9.2) recruited from the Memory Clinic at the University Hospital of Tübingen from July 2015 to July 2016. The participants fulfilled the inclusion criteria of normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity, of no severe hearing impairments and had the ability to perform tests and drawings without physical restrictions. Stepwise logistic regression of dTDT variables resulted in three main discrimination characteristics: the average velocity, the number of stroke changes and the number of colours (ROC AUC=0.90). The reanalysis without colour variables resulted in an AUC of 0.89, which also indicated a very good subject-group separation, but at the expense of a reduction in sensitivity from .86 to .77. Our results suggest that the number of colours used in a free tree drawing task has an impact on discriminating healthy subjects from patients with early AD. However the effect is rather small and should be investigated in more detail in a specially designed trial.

The authors declare that a positive ethics committee vote has been obtained.


References

1.
Alzheimer's Association. 2017 Alzheimer's disease facts and figures. Alzheimer's & Dementia. 2017 Apr 1;13(4):325-73.
2.
Shulman KI, Pushkar Gold D, Cohen CA, Zucchero CA. Clock‐drawing and dementia in the community: A longitudinal study. International journal of geriatric psychiatry. 1993 Jun;8(6):487-96.