Remote versus face-to-face neuropsychological testing for dementia research: a comparative study in people with Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia and healthy older individuals

Objectives We explored whether adapting neuropsychological tests for online administration during the COVID-19 pandemic was feasible for dementia research. Design We used a longitudinal design for healthy controls, who completed face-to-face assessments 3-4 years before remote assessments. For patients, we used a cross-sectional design, contrasting a prospective remote cohort with a retrospective face-to-face cohort matched for age/education/severity. Setting Remote assessments were conducted using video-conferencing/online testing platforms, with participants using a personal computer/tablet at home. Face-to-face assessments were conducted in testing rooms at our research centre. Participants The remote cohort comprised 25 patients (n=8 Alzheimer's disease (AD); n=3 behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD); n=4 semantic dementia (SD); n=5 progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA); n=5 logopenic aphasia (LPA)). The face-to-face patient cohort comprised 64 patients (n=25 AD; n=12 bvFTD; n=9 SD; n=12 PNFA; n=6 LPA). Ten controls who previously participated in face-to-face research also took part remotely. Outcome measures The outcome measures comprised the strength of evidence under a Bayesian framework for differences in performances between testing environments on general neuropsychological and neurolinguistic measures. Results There was substantial evidence suggesting no difference across environments in both the healthy control and combined patient cohorts (including measures of working memory, single-word comprehension, arithmetic and naming; Bayes Factors (BF) 01 >3), in the healthy control group alone (including measures of letter/category fluency, semantic knowledge and bisyllabic word repetition; all BF 01 >3), and in the combined patient cohort alone (including measures of working memory, episodic memory, short-term verbal memory, visual perception, non-word reading, sentence comprehension and bisyllabic/trisyllabic word repetition; all BF 01 >3). In the control cohort alone, there was substantial evidence in support of a difference across environments for tests of visual perception (BF 01 =0.0404) and monosyllabic word repetition (BF 01 =0.0487). Conclusions Our findings suggest that remote delivery of neuropsychological tests for dementia research is feasible.