Free-listing and semantic knowledge: A diagnostic tool for detecting Alzheimer’s disease?

INTRODUCTION: We investigate the impact of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) on specific semantic categories integral to daily function: living kinds and artefacts.METHODS: We relied on a “free-listing task,” and assessed its relationship with other cognitive and functional tests in clinical use. The participant pool was comprised of 19 AD patients and a control group, 15 cognitively normal adults. RESULTS: Group membership (AD or control), controlling for age, education, estimate of premorbid intellectual ability, and sex, predicts performance in the free-listing across categories. Functional status is inversely related to the performance on free-listing, holding demographic variables constant.DISCUSSION: Our findings confirm previous observations identifying an impairment of semantic knowledge in AD. Free-listing is effective at detecting this impairment. This easy-to-administer, cost-effective tool could aid in the fast preliminary characterization of AD. Cognitive assessment tools that can be applied across cultures are needed: free-listing has the potential to address this gap.