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Updated: Jul 15, 2026

The 4 Mountains Test: A Short Test of Spatial Memory with High Sensitivity for the Diagnosis of Pre-dementia Alzheimer's Disease
Published on: October 13, 2016
[Description of a novel test for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease]
F Cuetos-Vega1, M Menendez-González, T Calatayud-Noguera
1Universidad de Oviedo, Facultad de Psicologia, Oviedo, Spain.
Introduction:
Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease (AD) as soon as possible is critical to achieve an effective treatment of patients.
Aim:
To make up a test capable of differentiating those patients suffering from the early stages of AD compared to healthy people or patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
Subjects And Methods:
A test with 10 memory and language tasks was applied to 85 people: 34 in the early stage of probable AD, 26 with MCI, and 25 healthy people. The groups did not differ with regard to age, sex or studies.
Results:
The analysis of variance showed significative differences between groups in all tasks as well as in the global score. Sensibility and specificity were calculated to MCI and AD.
Conclusions:
We designed a new test to detect AD patients on an early stage that is quick and easy to apply. The preliminary scale results in controls, MCI and early AD are shown.
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