| The prevalence of dementia may double every 20 years, increasing the demand on physicians' time and resources. Currently, there are no brief neuropsychological assessment instruments validated for the use of diagnosing dementia subtypes; most instruments are validated for diagnosing overall dementia or staging dementia progression.;The Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (NAB) Screening Module contains measures of functioning found to be important in diagnosing dementia subtypes (i.e., attention, language, memory, spatial abilities, executive functioning). To determine whether the NAB Screening Module can be used to diagnose dementia subtypes, logistic regression analyses were performed for Alzheimer's disease, comorbid Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia, vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies/Parkinson's disease dementia, and frontotemporal dementia with the various subscales and domains from the NAB as predictors.;The Naming, Story Learning Delayed Recall, and Visual Discrimination subscales, as well as the Memory domain were all significant predictors of Alzheimer's disease. The Auditory Comprehension and Story Learning Delayed Recall subscales, as well as the Language domain were significant predictors of Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia comorbidity. The Story Learning Delayed Recall subscale was a significant predictor of vascular dementia. No predictors were significant in predicting dementia with Lewy bodies/Parkinson's disease dementia. Lastly, the Language domain was the only significant predictor of frontotemporal dementia. Receiver Operating Characteristic curves were assessed, and effect sizes were inadequate. The results suggest that the NAB Screening Module could be used to predict dementia subtypes, but that a larger sample size is needed to determine its predictive ability for this purpose. |
