Screening for Very Mild Subcortical Vascular Dementia Patients Aged 75 and Above Using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and Mini-Mental State Examination in a Community: The Kurihara Project

AIMS: To examine the effectiveness of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to screen people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), to associate the MoCA score with the presence of infarction, and to detect the characteristics of people with very mild subcortical vascular dementia (vmSVD). METHODS: 392 out of 886 community dwellers aged 75 years and above living in Kurihara, Northern Japan, agreed to participate in our study; 164 scored a Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) of 0 (healthy), 184 scored a CDR of 0.5 (MCI) and 44 scored a CDR of 1+ (dementia). The participants scoring a CDR of 0.5 were divided into 2 subtypes: 37 had vmSVD and 147 had other types of dementia. The objective variables were the total MoCA, the MoCA subscale and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). RESULTS: There was a difference in the MoCA and MMSE scores between the 3 CDR groups. The MoCA score overlapped in participants with CDR 0 and 0.5. There were significant CDR effects, while there were no significant infarction effects for the MoCA and MMSE. vmSVD participants had lower scores on the total MoCA, the MoCA attention subscale and MMSE than healthy elderly people and participants with other types of dementia. CONCLUSION: Our results suggested that MMSE performed rather well and that the MoCA is not superior to MMSE in MCI and vmSVD participants aged 75 and above in a community.