A/Prof Piers Dawes and his SENSEcog project colleagues have published a version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) adapted and validated for people with hearing impairment.
The MoCA is the most widely used screening test for cognitive impairment/dementia. Former President Trump boasted about his exceptional performance on the MoCA, which was given to identify cognitive impairments in the executive leader of the United States.
But as the MoCA is a spoken test, it relies on people having good hearing function. Someone may fail the MoCA due to hearing impairment rather than cognitive impairment. Given how common hearing impairment is in older adults, there is an urgent need for validated cognitive screening assessments for people with hearing impairment.
Working with the MoCA developers in Montreal, Dr Dawes and his SENSEcog project colleagues developed and validated an alternative form of the MoCA for people with hearing impairment. The MoCA-HI has excellent sensitivity and specificity for identifying cognitive impairment in people with hearing loss, with performance comparable to the standard MoCA.
Dr Dawes’s MoCA-HI was published this week on the MoCAtest.org website. It is freely available to clinicians and researchers around the world. Translations of the MoCA-HI in French, German, Greek and Portuguese are in the pipeline. A version of the MoCA for people with vision impairment is forthcoming.
