Why the study?
Appropriate age-norms for A Quick Test of Cognitive Speed (AQT) to identify cognitive impairment in elderly patients have been lacking.
What are the appropriate age-norms for A Quick Test of Cognitive Speed (AQT) in cognitively healthy 80 to 94-year olds?
What are the appropriate age-norms for A Quick Test of Cognitive Speed (AQT) in cognitively healthy 80 to 94-year olds?
This study provides updated regression-based norms for the AQT in older adults, revealing that previously recommended cutoff criteria for cognitive impairment may be too stringent for healthy 80-94 year olds.
Existing AQT cutoffs may overestimate impairment in healthy 80-94 year olds; leaves open norm revision pending longitudinal validation.
Slowed processing speed is part of normal aging but also a symptom of many diseases, including dementia. A Quick Test of Cognitive Speed (AQT) consists of three conditions: color naming (AQT1), form naming (AQT2) and dual color-form naming (AQT3) and offers a user-friendly assessment of processing speed that is used internationally to identify cognitive impairment in elderly patients. Appropriate age-norms have however been lacking. This study provides regression-based norms derived from a Swedish sample of 158 cognitively healthy 80 to 94-year olds. The results show age effects in all three conditions, a non-linear education effect in AQT1, and age by gender interactions in AQT2 and AQT3: men performed worse with increasing age, but women remained on a par. However, irrespective of age and gender, AQT2 and AQT3 mean raw and predicted scores were slower than the hitherto recommended cutoff criteria for suspected cognitive impairment.
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Classon et al. (2021) studied this question.
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