Language Registration-Based Scoring System for Handwritten Logical Memory of Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised: Developed and Validated in the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project

Abstract

The logical memory (LM) of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised was conducted in the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project in handwritten form. Our purpose was to develop and validate the Language registration-based scoring system for the handwritten LM. Seven hundred eighty consecutive participants underwent handwritten LM by listening to the recorded audio of two Stories and immediately afterward recalling the stories in handwriting on an answer sheet. All the answer sheets were transcribed into a digital version and were classified into the training and validation cohorts. Each Story had 25 Units, and an experienced clinical psychologist decided the variant patterns that could be scored based on Units using the training cohorts. In the validation cohort, the digital version of the answer sheets was checked to determine if it contained the variant patterns allowed as correct answers based on units, and the scores and the number of characters were calculated. The correlations between the scores and the number of characters, age, education duration, and the Japanese version of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE-J) were evaluated. The score was a median of 19 (range 0-42) and was significantly correlated with the number of characters (r = 0.85, p < 0.0001). The scores significantly negatively correlated with age (r = –0.41, p < 0.0001) and significantly positively correlated with education duration and MMSE-J (ρ = 0.20, p < 0.0001; ρ = 0.35, p < 0.0001). In conclusion, we proposed the Language registration-based scoring system for the handwritten immediate recall of LM, and the scores were significantly correlated with the number of characters, age, education duration, and the MMSE-J.