Susceptibility of the conventional criteria for mild cognitive impairment to false‐positive diagnostic errors

“…There is a need to examine the utility of cognitive domains examined in existing MCI criteria in heterogenous clinical samples likely to include AD, vascular, and Lewy body dementias (Taylor et al, 2020;Tensil et al, 2018;Wolters & Ikram, 2019), as well as premorbid or comorbid conditions affecting baseline cognitive performance or rate of progression (Albai et al, 2019;Mubashir et al, 2019).While the learning curves showed small sex effects, the larger literature allude to the potential public health consequences of relative sex and/or gender differences at different stages of AD (Bloomberg et al, 2021;Shang et al, 2021;Udeh-Momoh & Watermeyer, 2021). Contrary to prior cohort studies (Bondi et al, 2014;Edmonds et al, 2015;Edmonds et al, 2016;Eppig et al, 2017) that have found concerning false positive (31.3%-34.2%) and false-negative (7.1%) rates of MCI, the Jak/Bondi MCI criteria had minimal falsenegative rates (0.9-2.0%) in our clinical sample. Given that cohort study algorithms are primarily designed to detect emergent MCI in more homogenous and high functioning research participants at enrollment, our findings are not surprising.…”