Performance of Brazilian long and short IQCODE on the screening of dementia in elderly people with low education

Abstract

The long, short and the new short Brazilian IQCODE versions can be useful as a screening tool for mild and moderate patients with dementia in Brazil. The IQCODE is not biased by schooling, and it seems to be an adequate instrument for samples with low levels of education.

Clinical history for diagnosis of dementia in men: Caerphilly Prospective Study

“…Items on everyday maths, personal finances, and reasoning were all derived from IQCODE, 26 and were previously found to have modest utility (AUC 0.85, 0.82, 0.82, respectively) in a case-control study in secondary care. 38 As a whole, the IQCODE is sensitive (0.80) and specific (0.84) for diagnosing dementia, 39 and functioning items have been found to be more discriminatory than memory items, 40 which is in keeping with the present results.…”

Performance of the 16-Item Informant Questionnaire on Cognitive Decline for the Elderly (IQCODE) in an Arabic-Speaking Older Population

“…Its performance is essentially identical to that of the original version [14]. The validity of the short IQCODE as a screening instrument for dementia was subsequently confirmed in other studies, with sensitivity ranging from 79 to 100% and specificity from 68 to 100% [13, 17, 18]. The IQCODE requires an informant who has known the older individual in question for at least 10 years to respond to the questions.…”

“…It has a high reliability and is a good measure of general cognitive decline [10–12]. It is not affected by premorbid intelligence or education and therefore useful as a complementary screening tool for dementia among older people with limited education [12, 13]. …”

Screening properties of the German IQCODE with a two-year time frame in MCI and early Alzheimer's disease

“…Importantly, a logistic regression analysis produced a very short 7-item IQCODE with a diagnostic accuracy as high as the longer version. Interestingly, all of these seven items are also part of the Brazilian 15-item short form of the IQCODE, recently developed by Perroco et al (2009) in a study of NC and AD groups (mean MMSE = 27.9 and 19.8, respectively) with low levels of education (mean education level = 5.4 and 4.8, respectively). Moreover, five of our seven items are also represented in the group of the eight best discriminating items of the Brazilian short form.…”

“…The Informant Questionnaire on Cognitive Decline in the Elderly (IQCODE) is a well-established and widely used informantbased screening tool designed to estimate cognitive decline from a previous level of functioning (Jorm et al, 1989;Jorm, 2004 testing is difficult (e.g. comprehension difficulties) and for patients with very low levels of education (Fuh et al, 1995;Senanarong et al, 2001;Perroco et al, 2009). The IQCODE exists in two formsa longer 26-item and a shorter 16-item versionand requires the informant to rate the patient's cognitive decline from a previous level over the last 10 years on a five-point scale from "much improved" (1) to "much worse" (5), where a score of 3 represents a "no change" judgment.…”