Abstract
BackgroundThere is an increased interest of individuals in quantifying their own health and functional status. The aim of this study was to examine the concordance of answers to a self-administered questionnaire exploring health and functional status with information collected during a full clinical examination performed by a physician among cognitively healthy adults (CHI) and older patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild-to-moderate Alzheimer disease (AD).MethodsBased on cross-sectional design, a total of 60 older adults (20 CHI, 20 patients with MCI, and 20 patients with mild-to-moderate AD) were recruited in the memory clinic of Angers, France. All participants completed a self-administered questionnaire in paper format composed of 33 items exploring age, gender, nutrition, place of living, social resources, drugs daily taken, memory complaint, mood and general feeling, fatigue, activities of daily living, physical activity and history of falls. Participants then underwent a full clinical examination by a physician exploring the same domains.ResultsHigh concordance between the self-administered questionnaire and physician's clinical examination was showed. The few divergences were related to cognitive status, answers of AD and MCI patients to the self-administered questionnaire being less reliable than those of CHI.ConclusionOlder adults are able to evaluate their own health and functional status, regardless of their cognitive status. This result needs to be confirmed and opens new perspectives for the quantified self-trend and could be helpful in daily clinical practice of primary care.
Highlights
Quantified self (QS) is a recent trend in general population based on self-measure of health and functional status using new digital technologies to become healthier or remain healthy [1]
Alzheimer disease (AD) patients were older than mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and CHI (P = 0.001)
CHI and MCI patients (P = 0.017) lived more frequently at home compared to AD patients
Summary
Quantified self (QS) is a recent trend in general population based on self-measure of health and functional status using new digital technologies to become healthier or remain healthy [1]. The miniaturization of devices combined with new digital technologies allow the measure of human physiological parameters reflecting health status (e.g., caloric expenditures or blood pressure) The advantage of this ‘‘high-tech’’ QS is to provide objective measures, but its main disadvantage is to consider the individual more as a measurement object, than an actor of his own health, the latter point being yet crucial for health improvement. It has been reported that improvements of health and functional status, as well as reduced adverse consequences on health systems, depend in part on the active participation of individuals [2,3,4] For this reason, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of self-administered questionnaires to rate and monitor individuals’ own health [4,5,6]. The aim of this study was to examine the concordance of answers to a self-administered questionnaire exploring health and functional status with information collected during a full clinical examination performed by a physician among cognitively healthy adults (CHI) and older patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild-to-moderate Alzheimer disease (AD)
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