Abstract
BackgroundSince its introduction by Hodkinson in 1972, Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS) and its English and other language versions have been widely used in research and clinical practice alike. However, whether the various versions of AMTS yield equivalent information has never been tested.MethodsWe performed cross-sectional assessment of inpatients aged 65+ years with seven AMTS versions and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) after correction for age and education (MMSEc). We used the MMSEc cut-off score of < 24 as comparator and fitted linear regression models from which we obtained the receiver operating characteristics, and further compared the c-statistics obtained for each version of AMTS. We used Spearman’s correlation to check the relation between different AMTS versions.ResultsThe mean (SD) age of 72 (52.8% women) patients was 76.2 (7.6) years. The average time spent on education was 11.3 (3.5) years. The AMTS score across versions varied between 7.4 (2.0) and 8.2 (1.7). The MMSE averaged 24.1 (4.6) and the MMSEc averaged 25.2 (4.1). We found that the c-statistic across AMTS versions with dichotomised MMSEc as comparator ranged from 0.83 to 0.85 and did not significantly differ from the c-statistic of 0.87 for original AMTS (all p > 0.16). We found AMTS versions to be significantly correlated (all r between 0.83 and 0.99, all p < 0.0001).ConclusionsWe found AMTS to be a reliable and useful tool in the screening for possible cognitive impairment. This seems to be true irrespective of whether we use the original test or any of its studied modifications.
Highlights
Since its introduction by Hodkinson in 1972, Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS) and its English and other language versions have been widely used in research and clinical practice alike
Based on the unadjusted MiniMental State Examination (MMSE) results, 38.7% of the subjects had the suspicion of cognitive impairment
The concordances (AUC) between studied AMTS versions and the classification of patients based on MMSEc ranged from 0.83 to 0.87 and did not significantly differ
Summary
Since its introduction by Hodkinson in 1972, Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS) and its English and other language versions have been widely used in research and clinical practice alike. Conclusions We found AMTS to be a reliable and useful tool in the screening for possible cognitive impairment This seems to be true irrespective of whether we use the original test or any of its studied modifications. The Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS) was first introduced in 1972 by Hodkinson for the assessment of mental impairment in old age [1]. AMTS is a 10-item screening questionnaire that included in the original version questions about: subject’s age, date of birth, the current time and year, the name of hospital, the name of the present British monarch, the year of the beginning of the First World War; and a recall of a previously given address, counting backwards by 1, from 20 to 1, and recognition of two persons (e.g., doctor, nurse, etc.) [2]. We found a Polish version of AMTS [7, 8] which has been widely used both in clinical practice [8] and research [9] (Table 1).
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