Comparing the Standard and Electronic Versions of the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale — Cognitive Subscale: A Validation Study

Abstract

The Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS-Cog) has become the de facto gold-standard for assessing the efficacy of putative anti-dementia treatments. There has been an increasing interest in providing greater standardization, automation, and administration consistency to the scale. Recently, electronic versions of the ADAS-Cog (eADAS-Cog) have been utilized in clinical trials and demonstrated significant reductions in frequency of rater error as compared to paper. In order to establish validity of the electronic version (eADAS-Cog), 20 subjects who had received a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at a private US Memory Clinic completed a single-center, randomized, counterbalanced, prospective trial comparing a version of the eADAS-Cog to the standard paper scale. Interclass Correlation Coefficient on total scores and Kappa analysis on domain scores yielded high agreement (0.88–0.99). Effects of order and mode of administration on ADAS-Cog total scores did not demonstrate a significant main effect. Overall, this study establishes adequate concurrent validity between the ADAS-Cog and eADAS-Cog among an adult population with diagnosed AD.