Performance on the standard and hearing-impaired Montreal Cognitive Assessment in cochlear implant users

Commonly used cognitive screening tools were not originally developed for patients with hearing loss (HL) and rely heavily on the ability to hear the instructions and test stimuli. Recently, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) was modified for use with hearing-impaired populations (ie, HI-MoCA). In order to investigate the clinical utility of the HI-MoCA, we assessed performance between the standard MoCA and HI-MoCA among postlingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) users.

We administered the standard MoCA and HI-MoCA to 21 CI users and compared their performance. We assessed differences in pass/fail status when items from the attention and language sections and the delayed recall task were removed.

There was no significant difference in performance between the standard MoCA and HI-MoCA. Participants scored higher on both test versions when the delayed recall task was removed. Participants also performed better on the delayed recall task on the HI-MoCA than on the standard MoCA.

While our findings suggest that the modality of presentation for the MoCA does not influence overall performance for postlingually deafened CI users, visual presentation of stimuli impacted performance on delayed recall. Furthermore, irrespective of presentation modality, our participants scored higher on both MoCA versions when the delayed recall task was removed. Clinically, modifications to the presentation of the MoCA might not be necessary for CI users; however, clinicians should be aware that the delayed recall task is inherently harder for these patients.