A comparison of two brief screening measures of cognitive impairment in Huntington's disease.

The goal of this study was to explore whether the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a new screening instrument, would be more sensitive to mild to moderate cognitive impairment in Huntington's disease (HD) than an established screening measure, the Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE). Our reasoning for this query is that the MoCA includes a broader range of test items and an additional assessment of executive functioning and attention compared with the MMSE. Using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to examine performance of HD and control groups on both tests on overall scores and scores from various subdomains (i.e., visuospatial abilities) revealed that the MoCA achieved higher sensitivity without sacrificing specificity in many domains relative to the MMSE.