Telephone-administered semantic fluency task in older adults without dementia in relation to in-person testing and plasma phosphorylated tau-217
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Objective: Semantic fluency is an essential part of the cognitive assessment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the utility of the telephone-administered version in detecting impairment in its in-person counterpart, or the associations with AD biomarkers, is unclear. Methods: Participants without previously diagnosed dementia from the population-based TWINGEN study (n = 200) completed telephone-administered 1-minute animal naming and in person-administered Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease – neuropsychological battery (CERAD-nb) and provided blood sample for determining plasma phosphorylated tau217 (p-tau217). Results: The two modalities showed a moderate-to-high correlation (r = .63), with a bias of 3.41 words favoring in-person administration. Older age and lower education, but not plasma p-tau217, were significantly associated with poorer semantic fluency in both modalities. Area under the receiver operating characteristics curve was .76 (95% CI: .65; .88) for impairment in in-person semantic fluency and .70 (95% CI: .56; .84) for CERAD-nb total score. Group differences for p-tau217 status were found using a three-range approach: most (60%) with low animal naming score had high p-tau217 whereas most (73%) with high score had low p-tau217 (χ2[2] = 9.41, p = .009). Conclusions: Telephone-administered animal naming can identify individuals with semantic fluency impairment with some caveats. Keywords: Dementia; Alzheimer disease; psychometrics; neuropsychological tests; neuropsychology; cognitive aging
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7208746323