Linking Cognitive Screening Tests in Community-Dwelling Older Adults: Crosswalk Between the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic and the Mini-Mental State Examination.

Objective: To develop the crosswalk between the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic (MoCA-B) and Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) based on a community-dwelling older population to facilitate data synthesis and comparison.

Design: A cross-sectional study.

Setting and participants: We used baseline data of 2170 subjects with total MoCA-B and MMSE scores from an ongoing prospective cohort study, the Beijing Longitudinal Disability Survey in Community Elderly (BLINDSCE).

Methods: The MoCA-B and MMSE were administered by trained assessors. Equipercentile equating was used to develop the conversion table between MoCA-B and MMSE scores in the total sample and subgroups by age, sex, residency, and education level. The mean absolute error (MAE), intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and Bland-Altman plot were used to evaluate the linking performance.

Results: MoCA-B and MMSE scores converted bi-directionally for the overall sample and subgroups, with small standardized MAE (SMAE) and high ICC. The linking results between MoCA-B and MMSE scores were consistent across the total sample and the age and sex subgroups, while a 2-score difference was observed within the residency and education subgroups.

Conclusions and implications: This study provides easy-to-use crosswalks between measures of MoCA-B and MMSE with precision among community-dwelling older adults. Our results help to compare and pool data across studies using either of the 2 cognitive screening tests and provide a useful reference to clinicians for better evidence-based practice in patients evaluated using different cognitive tests.