Analysis of macrolinguistic aspects of narratives from individuals with Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and no cognitive impairment

Introduction The depiction of features in discourse production promotes accurate diagnosis and helps to establish the therapeutic intervention in cognitive impairment and dementia. We aimed to identify alterations in the macrolinguistic aspects of discourse using a new computational tool. Methods Sixty individuals, aged 60 years and older, were distributed in three different groups: mild Alzheimer's disease (mAD), amnestic mild cognitive impairment, and healthy controls. A narrative created by individuals was analyzed through the Coh-Metrix-Dementia program, extracting the features of interest automatically. Results mAD showed worse overall performance compared to the other groups: less informative discourse, greater impairment in global coherence, greater modalization, and inferior narrative structure. It was not possible to discriminate between amnestic mild cognitive impairment and healthy controls. Discussion Our results are in line with the literature, verifying a pathological change in the macrostructure of discourse in mAD.