Functional decline in the elderly with MCI: Cultural adaptation of the ADCS-ADL scale

Translate, transcultural adaptation and application to Brazilian Portuguese of the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study - Activities of Daily Living (ADCS-ADL) scale as a cognitive screening instrument.

We applied the back translation added with pretest and bilingual methods. The sample was composed by 95 elderly individuals and their caregivers. Thirty-two (32) participants were diagnosed as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, 33 as Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and 30 were considered as cognitively normal individuals.

There were only little changes on the scale. The Cronbach alpha coefficient was 0.89. The scores were 72.9 for control group, followed by MCI (65.1) and by AD (55.9), with a p-value < 0.001. The ROC curve value was 0.89. We considered a cut point of 72 and we observed a sensibility of 86.2%, specificity of 70%, positive predictive value of 86.2%, negative predictive value of 70%, positive likelihood ratio of 2.9 and negative likelihood ratio of 0.2.

ADCS-ADL scale presents satisfactory psychometric properties to discriminate between MCI, AD and normal cognition.