Just like a versatile Swiss Army knife, mobile application software (APPs) can do more than we think! A recent study explored the use of APPs to assess visuospatial dysfunction in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and compared it to traditional assessment tools. The results showed that the APP was not only feasible but also an effective clinical screening tool for evaluating visuospatial abilities in PD patients. It had high sensitivity and specificity, meaning it could accurately identify those with visuospatial dysfunction. The study also found a strong correlation between the APP scores and other cognitive tests, reinforcing its validity. This is exciting news because now clinicians have a rapid and unified cognitive battery at their fingertips, making diagnosis easier and quicker for PD patients. If you want to dive deeper into the research on this groundbreaking use of mobile APPs, check out the original study!

BackgroundVisuospatial dysfunction and cognitive impairment are common in Parkinson’s disease (PD), which draw increasing attention in the current literature. But clinicians still lack rapid, effective and unified cognitive battery for visuospatial assessment.ObjectiveA new approach was studied to explore the feasibility of using mobile application software (APP) to evaluate visuospatial dysfunction in patients with PD and compared with traditional assessment tools. We aimed to verify the threshold score of the APP for early diagnosis.Materials and methodsA total of 41 patients with PD underwent assessments using several test modules including Digit Symbol Test (DST), Visual Organization Test (VOT), Facial Recognition Test (FRT), Vocabulary Memory Test (VMT) of this APP, as well as Clock Drawing Test (CDT), Cube Copying Test (CCT) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) for comparison. Among the 41 PD patients, 30 individuals were found to have visuospatial dysfunction based on CDT score < 5 and CCT score of<18 while the remaining 11 patients served as control.ResultsThere were statistically significant differences in DST, VOT, and FRT scores (all p ≤ 0.001 for group comparisons). DST, VOT, and FRT-1 were significantly correlated with MMSE, CDT and CCT and the correlations were moderate or fairly strong. For visuospatial dysfunction diagnosis, all the areas under curves (AUC) of DST, VOT, and FRT-1 were statistically significant (p < 0.0001, p = 0.0002, and p = 0.0002, respectively). The estimates and 95% confidence intervals of AUC were 0.8303 (0.6868, 0.9739), 0.8045 (0.6423, 0.9668), and 0.7833 (0.6344, 0.9322), respectively. Their cut-off points for visuospatial dysfunction were 26, 17, and 19, respectively. After dichotomization by the cut-off points, DST had high sensitivity of 96.67% while VOT and FRT-1 had high specificity of 81.82 and 90.91%.ConclusionThis study demonstrated that visuospatial disorders was highly prevalent in PD patients, and the APP used in study could be a practical clinical screening tool for visuospatial ability assessment with high sensitivity and specificity.

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