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Numerical activities of daily living: a short version

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Abstract

Specific impairments in numerical functions may cause severe problems in everyday life that cannot be inferred from the available scales evaluating instrumental activities of daily living. The Numerical Activities of Daily living (NADL) is a battery designed to assess the patient’s performance in everyday activities involving numbers (Informal Test) and in more scholastic capacities (Formal Test). A downside of this battery is its duration (45 min). The aim of the present study is to build a shorter version of NADL to make it more suitable for clinical and research purposes. The shortening procedure involved only the Formal test, and followed two steps: (i) a correlation of subtests with the general scores, and (ii) an item-analysis within the subtests previously showing higher correlations. Correlations between NADL-Short and NADL original version, and the new cut-offs were calculated. Lastly, the relationship between NADL-Short and other brief cognitive screening tests used in the clinical practice was evaluated in neurological patients and healthy controls. The NADL-Short includes the original Informal Test and the shortened Formal Test. It is a quick and easy clinical tool (15 min) to assess numerical abilities applied to informal and formal situations. It correlates highly with the original battery (Kendall’s tau greater than 0.6 across tasks) and the cut-offs correctly identify impaired performance (accuracy of 95% or above). Correlation analysis showed a low positive correlation between NADL-Short and other brief cognitive scales. These findings suggest that it is appropriate to use specific tools to make inferences about a person's numerical abilities.

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Change history

  • 22 October 2021

    The correct designation for affiliation should be IRCCS San Camillo Hospital.

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Funding

The writing of this paper was made possible by the support of “Progetto giovani ricercatori: FINAGE” (GR-2018–12367927) from the Ministry of Health to F.B. SBV was funded by the Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale – PRIN; Prot. 2017PSRHPZ).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRCCS San Camillo Hospital, Via Alberoni 70, 30126, Venice, Italy

    Francesca Burgio, Laura Danesin, Francesca Meneghello & Giorgio Arcara

  2. Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Silvia Benavides-Varela

  3. Department of Neuroscience (Padova Neuroscience Center), University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Silvia Benavides-Varela & Carlo Semenza

  4. UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, UK

    Brian Butterworth

Authors
  1. Francesca Burgio
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  6. Giorgio Arcara
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  7. Carlo Semenza
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Laura Danesin, Giorgio Arcara, Silvia Benavides-Varela, Francesca Burgio. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Francesca Burgio and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesca Burgio.

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Ethical approval and consent to participate

All participants gave their informed consent according to the Helsinki Declaration. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee for clinical experimentation of Venice and IRCCS San Camillo Hospital (Venice, Italy), reference number 2016.07.

As stated in the declarations, all participants gave their informed consent according to Helsinki Declaration and the study was approved by the local ethics commitee.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Giorgio Arcara and Carlo Semenza share the senior authorship.

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Burgio, F., Danesin, L., Benavides-Varela, S. et al. Numerical activities of daily living: a short version. Neurol Sci 43, 967–978 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-021-05391-z

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