Linking Cognitive Screening Tests in Community-Dwelling Older Adults: Crosswalk between the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic and the Mini-Mental State Examination

Objective: To develop the crosswalk between the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic (MoCA-B) and Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) based on a community-dwelling older population to facilitate data synthesis and comparison. Design: A cross-sectional study. Setting and Participants: We used baseline data of 2170 subjects with total MoCA-B and MMSE scores from an ongoing prospective cohort study, the Beijing Longitudinal Disability Survey in Community Elderly (BLINDSCE). Methods: The MoCA-B and MMSE were administered by trained assessors. Equipercentile equating was used to develop the conversion table between MoCA-B and MMSE scores in the total sample and subgroups by age, sex, residency, and education level. The mean absolute error (MAE), intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and Bland-Altman plot were used to evaluate the linking performance. Results: MoCA-B and MMSE scores converted bi-directionally for the overall sample and subgroups, with small standardized MAE (SMAE) and high ICC. The linking results between MoCA-B and MMSE scores were consistent across the total sample and the age and sex subgroups, while a 2-score difference was observed within the residency and education subgroups. Conclusions and Implications: This study provides easy-to-use crosswalks between measures of MoCA-B and MMSE with precision among community-dwelling older adults. Our results help to compare and pool data across studies using either of the 2 cognitive screening tests and provide a useful reference to clinicians for better evidence-based practice in patients evaluated using different cognitive tests. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medical Association. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).