Estudo de validade do teste de memória de curto prazo

Abstract

Up to the year 2025, there will be a decrease in the Brazilian population growth rate, with the consequent increase of elderly population. Memory impair is some of the most common complaints among elderly, and the use of tests are necessary to assess the memory performance and assess to verify the evolution of dementia. However, neuropsychological tasks adapted to Brazilian population are still recent and scarce. At the end of 20th century, adaptation and normatization studies to Brazilian context opened doors to the creation of other neuropsychological tests, increasing the interest of researchers and clinicians on the field, what motivated the creation of the “Test of Short Term Memory”, developed to assess short term memory and be used as a tool for differential diagnosis of dementia. The purpose of this work was to study the validity of the Test of Short Term Memory, in order to demonstrate its potential to inform about the short term storage process, in an elderly population. The research was conducted with 187 elderly of Manaus. Among them, 63,1% were female and 36,9% were male. Ages varied between 60 to 85 years-old, and education varied between 1 to 23 years of study. In the test activities, elderly with more than 8 years of education had a greater performance than those with none or low education. In relation to age, the bigger the age, the worse the performance of the elderly. Normative data were developed to the test and, due to the homogeneity of the group, they were classified by age and education level to an adequate measure of the results. The study showed low internal consistency between the items of the test and low correlation between activities. Therefore, using validity studies (criteria and construct validity), we recognize the need for new studies to verify the validity of this instrument.