Abstract
Objectives: Hong Kong – Vigilance and Memory Test (HK-VMT) is developed to distinguish early cognitive impairment in the pre-symptomatic phase from normal cognitive ageing in older adults. The objectives were to validate HK-VMT to differentiate mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy control (HC), and to explore the cut-off scores for different educational levels.
Method: A total of 606 older adults underwent the HK-VMT and conventional cognitive tests. HK-VMT is a 15 minutes cognitive battery that assesses episodic memory, attention, and visuospatial ability. The HK-VMT total is the sum of accuracy of all subtests with a range of 0 to 40. Differences in socio-demographic and clinical characteristics between groups were explored. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses were used to compare HK-VMT and Cantonese Mini Mental State Examination (CMMSE). A sample of 50 participants repeated the HK-VMT in 1 month to evaluate test-retest reliability.
Results: ROC analysis of Area Under Curve (AUC) demonstrated that HK-VMT (AUC 0.793) was comparable to CMMSE (AUC 0.748) in differentiating MCI from HC in a matched sample. A cutoff at 21/22 was chosen yielding a sensitivity of 86.1% and a specificity of 75.3% for differentiating MCI and HC. Test-retest reliability of HK-VMT total was 0.71 (p<.001) in a month time.
Conclusion: HK-VMT has demonstrated satisfactory validity in detecting cognitive impairment with good test-retest reliability in local older adults. It also performed favourably in the highly educated group when compared to CMMSE.
Ethics approval
The study had obtained approvals from the Institutional Ethics Committees of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Acknowledgement
The HK-CNTB was written by two computer programmers, Mr. Ming Sun, Fung and Mr. Shu-Sam, Chan. We would also like to dedicate our thanks to all participants who completed all the cognitive tests for the development of HK-VMT in this study.
Disclosure statement
The authors report no conflict of interest.
Notes
1 I In Hong Kong, primary and secondary education each consists of 6 years.