Author interview: Diagnostic test accuracy of telehealth assessment for dementia and mild cognitive impairment

In this study, 71% of participants who had MCI were correctly identified using telehealth assessment, as were 97% of those who had any cognitive diagnosis (either MCI or dementia), but only 22% of those who had no cognitive diagnosis at face-to-face assessment. However, the latter result was especially uncertain because there were so few patients in this category. It is important to note that diagnoses of dementia and MCI made by two specialists seeing patients face-to-face will not show 100% agreement. Therefore, perfect agreement between telehealth and face-to-face assessments cannot be expected. The larger Australian study was interesting because it also included a group who had two face-to-face assessments; the authors found that agreement between telehealth and face-to-face assessments was no worse than agreement between two face-to-face assessments. Therefore, although there was less evidence than we would like to have found, we did not find any reason to think that dementia diagnoses made by clinicians using videoconference assessments were likely to be inaccurate.What would you like to see happen next to build on this study?There are many more questions to be answered. We have not touched so far on the diagnosis of different subtypes of dementia, which is something else clinicians in memory clinics are usually trying to achieve. Although we intended to study accuracy of subtype diagnosis, we did not find any data on this at all. That would be something very importan...
Source: Cochrane News and Events - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: news