Western Aphasia Battery-Revised Profiles in Primary Progressive Aphasia and Primary Progressive Apraxia of Speech.
Heather M Clark, Rene L Utianski, Joseph R Duffy and 4 others
PMID 31639312WHAT IT FOUND
The WAB-R separated PPAOS from most PPA groups, but 27 people with PPA scored normal.
When the test indicated aphasia, anomic was the most common profile. Use a broader battery.
Key findings
01The WAB-R AQ was significantly higher in PPAOS than in PAA, LPA, and SD, but not PFA. At the individual level, 27 people with PPA scored above the normal cutoff, and the cutoff showed 79.9% sensitivity and 97% specificity.
02When the WAB-R AQ indicated aphasia, anomic aphasia was the most common profile. It appeared in each PPA variant group and in PPAOS, and it made up 60% of the sample.
03Ratio profiles aligned with group patterns for 78% of PAA participants with AQ lower than 93.8 and 70% of SD participants with abnormal AQ.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study only included people with PPA or PPAOS. It did not test how the WAB-R performs against other conditions that can cause progressive language impairment. The consensus diagnosis used WAB-R scores as part of a broader battery. This may have made agreement between the WAB-R and the diagnosis look better than it is. Some groups were small, such as 9 people with PFA and 14 people with SD. The WAB-R subtests combine several tasks, so they may not map cleanly onto PPA classification algorithms that use specific tasks such as sentence repetition or single-word comprehension.
Declared interests
The study was funded by National Institutes of Health Grants R01 DC010367 and R01 DC12519.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that a normal WAB-R AQ rules out PPA or that an anomic profile identifies a variant. In this sample, 27 participants with PPA had AQs above the normal cutoff, and anomic profiles appeared across PPA groups and PPAOS.