The Chinese version of informant AD8 for mild cognitive impairment and dementia screening in community-dwelling older adults

Abstract

Background: Conducting routine mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia screening for older adults in the community is important, which not only can improve our understanding of these diseases but also can increase early detection and treatment. Methods: To analyze the reliability and validity of the informant AD8 and explore the cut-off values for screening MCI and dementia in the community-dwelling older adults, this study adopted a multi-stage cluster sampling method to recruit 327 participants aged 60 and over in communities. The informant AD8 and Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scales were used to evaluate cognitive function of the subjects, and the receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC) was conducted to test the screening efficacy. Results: Among the 327 participants, 33.0% of them met the criteria of MCI, and 3.4% of them met the criteria of dementia. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the informant AD8 for screening dementia was 0.974, with a screening cut-off of three, sensitivity of 90.9% and specificity of 89.0%. But it has a poor discriminability in MCI screening [AUC = 0.645, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.578–0.711]. Conclusions: This study suggests that the informant AD8 is an ideal and useful tool for dementia screening in community-dwelling older adults. However, it is less capable to distinguish older adults with MCI from those with normal cognitive function.