Development and Clinical Validity of a Mild Vascular Cognitive Impairment Assessment Tool for Korean Stroke Patients

The present study was conducted to develop a mild vascular cognitive impairment (MVCI) assessment tool for patients with stroke and to examine its validity, reliability, and clinical adequacy.

Items of this tool were developed based on previously verified cognitive assessment tools. Face, content, and criterion (concurrent) validities, optimal cut-off score for differentiation of MVCI and normal cognitive function, clinical adequacy, internal consistency, and inter-rater reliability of the assessment tool were determined in 60 stroke patients at a university hospital located in Incheon, South Korea.

The devised MVCI assessment tool contains 20 items which were designed to assess seven cognitive domains: orientation, memory, language, attention, reasoning/abstraction, visuospatial perception, and executive function/problem solving. Content, face, and construct validities were well supported. Clinical adequacy testing revealed that the overall probability of correctly discriminating MVCI using the MVCI assessment tool for stroke was 90.0%, which was statistically significant. Furthermore, a score of 23 was found to be the optimal cut-off score for MVCI. Internal consistency and inter-rater reliability were also well supported.

The findings of this study indicate that the developed MVCI assessment tool for stroke could serve as a clinically useful tool for detecting MVCI and for properly assessing degree of cognitive impairment in stroke patients.