Comparing the Standard and Electronic Versions of the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale - Cognitive Subscale: A...

The Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS-Cog) has become the de facto gold-standard for assessing the efficacy of putative anti-dementia treatments. There has been an increasing interest in providing greater standardization, automation, and administration consistency to the scale. Recently, electronic versions of the ADAS-Cog (eADAS-Cog) have been utilized in clinical trials and demonstrated significant reductions in frequency of rater error as compared to paper. In order to establish validity of the electronic version (eADAS-Cog), 20 subjects who had received a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) at a private US Memory Clinic completed a single-center, randomized, counterbalanced, prospective trial comparing a version of the eADAS-Cog to the standard paper scale. Interclass Correlation Coefficient on total scores and Kappa analysis on domain scores yielded high agreement (0.88 - 0.99). Effects of order and mode of administration on ADAS-Cog total scores did not demonstrate a significant main effect. Overall, this study establishes adequate concurrent validity between the ADAS-Cog and eADAS-Cog among an adult population with diagnosed AD.