Application of the Multilingual Aphasia Examination-Spanish in the evaluation of Hispanic patients post closed-head trauma

Despite the rapid increase of Hispanics in the U.S., there continues to be a lack of adequate psychological assessment tools to examine Spanish-speaki ng patients with cognitive or neuropsychological disturbances. We investiga ted the clinical utility of the Multilingual Aphasia Examination-Spanish (M AE-S) in the evaluation of language functions of Hispanic subjects post-tra umatic brain injury (TBI). The performance of 40 TBI patients was compared to that of 40 age-, gender-, and education-matched normal controls. Subject groups differed on the Visual Naming (VN), Controlled Oral Word Associatio n (COWA), and Token Test subtests. The VN and COWA subtests were the best d iscriminators of group membership. Distribution of scores for the patient g roup on the Rating of Articulation scale additionally indicate subtle artic ulatory difficulties post-TBI. For all subtests, trauma severity per Glasgo w Coma Scale was the best predictor of language performance, over and above the contribution of other clinical and demographic variables. These result s are consistent with prior reports of dysphasia post-TBI and suggest that the MAE-S is a sensitive and accurate measure to assess language disturbanc es in Hispanic populations.