Thammasat-NECTEC-Chula's Thai Language and Cognition Assessment (TLCA): The Thai Alzheimer's and Mild Cognitive...

Thammasat-NECTEC-Chula's Thai Language and Cognition Assessment (TLCA) is a cognitive paper-based test consisting of 21 tasks that cover 3 domains: memory, language, and other cognitive abilities. The TLCA follows some aspects of the existing tests (Thai Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination-Revised (Thai-ACE-R) and the Thai Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test (Thai-MoCA)) and many parts were reconstructed to be more adapted to the Thai culture. Data obtained from the test will be able to precisely distinguish between patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and Normal healthy Controls (NC). The TLCA was tested on 90 participants (32 on the paper-based version and 58 on the computerized version) using a scoring procedure and speech features from verbal responses with machine learning classification. The scoring results showed significant difference between non-AD (NC + MCI) vs AD participants in 3 domains and could differentiate between NC and MCI, while machine classification could classify in three settings: NC vs non-NC (MCI + AD), AD vs non-AD and NC vs MCI vs AD. These promising results suggest that TLCA could be further verified and used as an efficient assessment in MCI and AD screening for Thais.Clinical relevance- The speech feature analysis of TLCA showed promising result for screening MCI and AD for Thais.