Objective: The objective of this study is to evaluate the correlation between screening tool for dementia and gait status.

Background: Gait impairment in patient with cognitive decline has been much focused in last decades. However, gait disturbance in dementia is usually underdiagnosed clinically. Mini-mental state examination (MMSE) is the most widely used for screening test of dementia. Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) has been developed for more detail assessment of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The purpose of our study is to investigate the correlation between gait status and screening test for dementia.

Methods: We recruited 24 patients diagnosed with MCI, 22 patients diagnosed with early stage of dementia. All participants were examined by Korean version MMSE, MOCA test for screening and neuropsychological test for estimating cognitive function. All participants were also performed three-dimensional motion captures for objective measurement of gait. We evaluated the correlation between score of screening tool and gait parameters.

Results: MOCA significantly correlated with walking speed (r=0.33, p<0.05) and stride length(r=0.40, p<0.05). However, MMSE did not correlated with walking speed(r=0.26, p=0.11) and stride length(r=0.21, p=0.22). In neuropsychological test, stride length and walking speed were significantly correlated with memory and frontal lobe function.

Conclusions: We found that MOCA can more reflect gait status than MMSE in patient with cognitive decline. We postulate the reason is that MOCA is more sensitive tool than MMSE and contain frontal lobe function. Our result is support that MOCA is more useful screening tool for assessing MCI as well as gait status.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/a-study-of-correlation-between-screening-tools-for-cognitive-decline-and-gait-status-using-three-dimensional-gait-analysis/