The Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Screen: A cross-sectional comparison of established screening tools in a German-Swiss population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural ALS Screen (ECAS) has recently been developed as a fast and easy cognitive screening tool specifically designed for patients with motor impairments in routine clinical use. The German/Swiss-German version of the ECAS was validated in a German-Swiss consortium. One hundred and thirty-six non-demented ALS patients and 160 healthy controls were included in the study. In addition, the Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease plus Scale (CERAD plus) were administered to subgroups of patients. Results showed that administration of ECAS was fast (mean 24 min). Similar to the population in the UK version, ALS patients performed significantly worse in the ALS-specific functions (p < 0.001), specifically in the domain of language (p < 0.001), verbal fluency (p = 0.005) and executive functions (p = 0.02), but not for the non-ALS-specific functions. Carers reported behavioural abnormalities in about 30% and psychotic symptoms in 6% of the patients. Compared to ECAS, FAB, MoCA and CERAD were more generic and performance was not adjusted to motor speed. We conclude that the German/Swiss-German version of the ECAS is a fast and easy to administer cognitive screening instrument sensitive for ALS-specific dysfunctions and behaviour change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".