Research on cognitive impairment in Spanish speaking older adults has been constrained by the lack of appropriate methodologies for assessment and by the extremely limited availability of published cognitive assessment tests and norms for individuals residing in the U.S. This varies from the progress made in the assessment of other ethnic minority English speaking populations, such as African Americans, where ethnic specific cognitive norms have been collected and published. Hispanic, Spanish speakers present a unique challenge in that cognitive tests administered in English are inappropriate for use with monolingual and some bilingual Spanish speakers. The limited availability of appropriate assessment tools and strategies for Spanish speakers necessarily also limits the ability of clinicians to accurately diagnose memory and other cognitive impairment in this population, contributing to the health disparities between Hispanic and other populations in this country. The objective of the proposed research is to adapt into Spanish a commonly used clinical measure of memory functioning to establish preliminary norms which take into consideration key demographic variables that recent research has shown to influence test performance.
The specific aims of this proposal are: 1) To establish a Spanish list learning test comparable to the published (English) CVLT II to assess learning and memory;2) To analyze differences in performance on the Spanish test and the CVLT II versions in a group of healthy bilingual individuals and to compare performance of bilinguals with two groups of demographically matched monolingual individuals;3) To determine whether traditional demographic variables of age, education, and gender will influence or modify performance on the two list learning tests and whether the variables will have a similar influence on a narrative memory test, and 4) To determine whether use of unique variables, such as percentage of time residing in the U.S., percentage of education in the U.S., language preference, and language proficiency, aid in predicting performance on the list learning tests and the narrative memory test, above that explained by traditional demographic variables typically used in the development of norms for clinical cognitive assessment tests. Spanish speaking older adults present a challenge to health care professionals who may misdiagnose individuals with memory impairment due to a lack of appropriate language tools and methods. This research will facilitate the development of appropriate measures to improve diagnosis and reduce health disparities between Hispanic and other populations in this country.
