Avoiding spectrum bias caused by healthy controls. Diagnostic accuracy of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) for cognitive screening in old age psychiatry: Determining cutoff scores in clinical practice. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy. Healthline has strict sourcing guidelines and relies on peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical associations.

Further research is needed, especially to determine the best score threshold for accurate dementia diagnosis, especially in primary care settings. The authors say that the quality of the studies conducted on this topic wasn’t high enough to strongly recommend using the MoCA test for dementia diagnosis in various healthcare settings. Yet, using this cutoff also led to a significant number of incorrect results, with over 40% of people without dementia being mistakenly identified as having dementia. But other parts, like paying attention and using language, didn’t work as well.Ī 2021 review of seven studies found that, when practitioners used a score of less than 26 as a cutoff, the MoCA correctly detected more than 94% of people with dementia in different situations. The researchers found that some parts of the MoCA, like the executive function section that deals with planning and organization, were good at spotting concerns. This implies that while the MoCA can identify people needing more tests, it’s not ideal for diagnosing cognitive issues conclusively.Ī 2017 study looked at how well the MoCA works for people with Parkinson’s disease. In addition, when these results were compared to the performance of healthy individuals, the MoCA appeared to be more effective than it is in real clinical settings. Yet researchers note that its reliability for diagnosing these problems was limited. The test was able to confirm a typical ability to think and rule out severe issues like dementia. One study from 2020 assessed the MoCA’s effectiveness in detecting cognitive concerns among older adults in an outpatient mental health clinic. It appears to be particularly effective at identifying cognitive changes in individuals with higher education levels or when mild cognitive changes are the main focus of clinical attention.īut its accuracy can be influenced by factors such as the characteristics of the person being tested and the setting in which the test is administered. The accuracy of the MoCA test may vary depending on the specific context and population being assessed.

Moca cognitive assessment