DemTect®– effective to asses MCI and dementia – validation study of the Polish language version

Abstract

Objectives: To validate DemTect®, a highly sensitive psychometric screening tool – designed to identify patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and patients with dementia (AD).

Method: A prospective cohort/cross-sectional study was designed. The data were collected from a group of 224 subjects, including 85 patients with MCI, 109 with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 30 healthy control (HC) subjects. All subjects underwent a detailed neuropsychological assessment including CT, the assessment of biological parameters and a psychometric examination using DemTect®, MMSE, TYM, CDT and FAS.

Results: Subjects ranged in age from 55 to 94 years, with a mean age of 71.42 ± 9.86 years. Classification rates of DemTect® were superior for both the MCI and AD groups compared with the MMSE, with high sensitivities of 90% (cut-off ≤15) and 96.8% (cut-off < 10), respectively. The DemTect® Polish language version proved to be independent of age and education level.

Conclusion: The Polish language version of the DemTect® scale is easy to administer. It may be seen as a superior cognitive screening tool in day-to-day practice as it achieves more accurate differentiation between HC/MCI/AD compared with MMSE.

Keywords:

• dementia
• screening tool
• mild cognitive impairment
• early diagnosis

Acknowledgements

Authors are grateful to Prof. Calabrese and Prof. Kalbe for their permission to carry out a Polish translation and adaptation of the DemTect® test. Authors thank Dr Trypka, Dr Zimny, Dr Macioszek and Dr Szewczyk who took part in the diagnosis of the subjects. The authors received no funding for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.