Zhongguo quanke yixue (Jun 2023)
Value of Reduced Taste Recognition Ability in Early Warning of Mild Cognitive Impairment
Abstract
Background There is no effective cure for Alzheimer's disease. Early identification of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and determination of its sensitive warning indicators are current research hotspots. Objective To explore the relationship between taste recognition decline and cognitive function, and to clarify the value of taste recognition decline in early recognition of MCI. Methods From July to August 2022, 30 older adults with MCI were recruited from a Nanjing community by convenience sampling method, and were compared to age-, sex-, and years of education-matched 32 healthy controls. The General Information Questionnaire, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Beijing Version (MoCA-Beijing), the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Activities of Daily Living (ADL), and the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) were used to assess demographics, cognitive function, status of activities of daily living, and severity of dementia, respectively. The taste function was examined by the whole mouth test. Correlation analysis and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve were used to determine the value of taste recognition decline in early warning of MCI. Results Two groups had no significant differences in average age, gender ratio and average years of education (P>0.05), but significantly differed in the average MoCA-Beijing score and MMSE score (P<0.05). Compared with healthy controls, MCI patients had much lower average scores in overall taste recognition, sweet taste recognition, salty taste recognition and bitter taste recognition (P<0.05). In MCI patients, the overall taste recognition score was positively correlated with overall cognitive function, attention, orientation (r=0.433, 0.540, 0.392, P<0.05), salty taste recognition score was positively correlated with delayed recall ability (r=0.379, P<0.05), bitter taste recognition score was positively correlated with attention (r=0.471, P<0.05), umami taste recognition score was positively correlated with language ability (r=0.408, P<0.05). The AUC of the total score of taste recognition ability in predicting MCI was 0.781, with 0.844 sensitivity, 0.600 specificity, and an optimal cut-off value of 18.5. Conclusion Decreased abilities of sweet, salty and bitter recognition were found in MCI patients. The decreased ability of taste recognition was closely related to cognitive function. The decrease in the total score of taste recognition ability may partially predict MCI, and is a key early warning indicator of MCI.
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