Age and education-matched cut-off scores for the revised German/Swiss-German version of ECAS

Abstract

The Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural ALS Screen (ECAS) has been developed to assess cognition and behaviour in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Cognitive impairments of ALS-specific and ALS-non-specific functions can be determined using cut-off scores based on performance of healthy subjects. However, detailed analyses show that older healthy subjects perform worse than younger ones, whereas highly-educated individuals perform better than those with lower education levels. As a consequence, this study presents new age and education matched cut-off scores for the revised German/Swiss-German version of the ECAS based on the performance of 86 healthy subjects.

Key words:

• ECAS
• cut-off
• cognition
• amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
• validation
• German
• stratified
• executive

Acknowledgements

We thank the patients and carers who graciously gave of their time to participate in the study.

This is an EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) project [01ED1405]. The project is supported through the following organizations under the aegis of JPND – e.g. Germany: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, FKZ), Sweden: Vetenskaprådet Sverige, Poland: Narodowe Centrum Badarń I Rozwoju (NCBR). This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, BMBF (MND-Net) and Schweizerischer Nationalfonds.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at www.ecas.network.