Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA): normative study for the Portuguese population

TLDR: The Montreal Cognitive Assessment is a brief cognitive screening instrument with good psychometric features and an excellent sensitivity in the early detection of mild cognitive decline in cognitively healthy adults, with a distribution similar to that observed in the Portuguese population.

Abstract: The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a brief cognitive screening instrument with good psychometric features and an excellent sensitivity in the early detection of mild cognitive decline. The MoCA was applied to a community-based sample of cognitively healthy adults (n = 650), stratified according to sociodemographic variables (age, gender, educational level, geographic region, geographic localization, and residence area), with a distribution similar to that observed in the Portuguese population. The normative data were determined according to age and education as these were the sociodemographic variables that most significantly contributed to the prediction of the MoCA scores, explaining 49% of their variance.