Montreal Cognitive Assessment as Screening Measure for Mild and Major Neurocognitive Disorder in a Chilean Population

BACKGROUND: The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a sensitive screening instrument for mild neurocognitive disorder (mild NCD). However, cut-off scores and accuracy indices should be established using representative samples of the population. In this context, the aim of this study was to update the normative values, and diagnostic efficiency statistics of the MoCA to detect mild NCD in the Chilean population. METHODS: This study included 226 participants from the north, center, and south of the country, classified into 3 groups: healthy elderly (HE; n = 113), mild NCD (n = 65), and major neurocognitive disorder (major NCD; n = 48). RESULTS: The optimal cut-off score to discriminate mild NCD from HE participants was 20 points with a sensitivity of 82.8% and a specificity of 84.1%. The observed balance between sensitivity and specificity shows a good test performance either to confirm or discard a diagnosis. The cut-off between mild NCD and major NCD from HE participants was 19 points with 85.6% of sensitivity and 90.3% of specificity. CONCLUSION: Overall diagnostic accuracy can be considered as outstanding (AUC ≥0.904) when discriminating HE from both mild NCD and major NCD. These results showed that the MoCA is a suitable tool to identify mild NCD and major NCD.