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Cut-off point development for the Everyday Memory Questionnaire - Revised in perimenopausal women
Chen Zhu1, Elizabeth H X Thomas1, Qi Li1
1HER Centre Australia, Department of Psychiatry, School of Translational Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University and The Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Objective:
Subjective cognitive complaints have been reported in women during perimenopause and the Everyday Memory Questionnaire - Revised (EMQ-R) has been recently evaluated as a standardized instrument to measure subjective cognitive changes. The purpose of this study was to identify potential cut-off points for the EMQ-R retrieval subscale and attentional subscale, and to assess the validity of these cut-off points in detecting objective cognitive changes associated with reported subjective cognitive complaints.
Method:
After screening, 232 perimenopausal women were included in the analyses. The supervised classification and regression tree was applied to identify optimal cut-off points. Its performance was evaluated by the value of the receiver operating characteristics curve, sensitivity and specificity.
Results:
Findings revealed that the optimal cut-off point for the attentional subscale was 7, and for the retrieval subscale was 13. Both cut-off points presented acceptable discrimination performance. An independent t-test indicated that both cut-off points were associated with significant differences in scores on neuropsychological measures of retrieval (episodic memory and verbal fluency) as well as neuropsychological measures of higher-level attention (working memory).
Conclusion:
The identified cut-off points may be helpful for women to track or quantify their subjective experiences of brain fog or cognitive symptoms during the menopause transition.
