title: The Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale: findings from a low-education population.
abstract: We constructed a Chinese version of the cognitive component of the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS-Cog). In order to accommodate illiteracy, the Chinese version used pictures instead of words for assessing recall and recognition. The Chinese ADAS-Cog was administered to 125 individuals with no dementia, 127 with questionable dementia, and 77 with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Their age range was 51-92 years and their education range was 0-20 years. The Chinese ADAS-Cog had high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.87) and very high interrater reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient, or ICC, = 0.99) and test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.96). It had high correlations with scores on the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (Pearson's r = 0.85), the Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI, Pearson's r = -0.88), and CASI-estimated scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination (Pearson's r = -0.85). Performance on the Chinese ADAS-Cog was uninfluenced by age or gender, nor by education level except within the low education range of 0-6 years. Its memory items were best for early detection of dementia; its language items were best for monitoring the progression of dementia. This study found that the Chinese ADAS-Cog is a good instrument for use with Chinese AD patients.
authors.affiliation: Neurological Institute, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, and National Yang-Ming University School of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan. hcliu@vghtpe.gov.tw
authors.forename: Hsiu-Chih
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Evelyn Lee
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Teng
authors.forename: Ya-Yun
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Chuang
authors.forename: Ker-Neng
authors.initials: KN
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Jong-Ling
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Fuh
authors.forename: Pei-Ning
authors.initials: PN
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003071:Cognition; D003704:Dementia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000379:methods; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests / Q000592:standards*; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013624:Taiwan; D014177:Translations