Validation of the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS) in Japanese

BACKGROUND: In recent years, the population of elderly people in Japan with dementia has increased. Detection of cognitive impairment in the early stages is important for adequate treatment, care, and prevention. AIM: To investigate whether the reliability and validity of the instrument would carry over to a different population and language before using it for population-based epidemiological studies. METHODS: We studied 135 subjects, 49 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 86 healthy controls (CTL) using the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS) and developed the Japanese version of the TICS (TICS-J). We also evaluated combination of another telephone battery, the Category Fluency Test (CF). RESULTS: The sensitivity and specificity of the TICS-J to differentiate AD patients from CTL was 98.0% and 90.7%, respectively. Pearson's correlation coefficient for the TICS-J and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) was 0.858 (p < 0.001). On the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC), the area under the curve for the TICS-J was 98.7%. The combination of the TICS-J with the CF did not change the validity of the discrimination. CONCLUSION: These results indicated that TICS-J was a sensitive and specific instrument for differentiating AD patients from healthy controls.