Diagnostic accuracy of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) for cognitive screening in old age psychiatry: Determining cutoff scores in clinical practice. Avoiding spectrum bias caused by healthy controls.

This study shows that validating the MoCA using healthy controls overestimates specificity. Taking clinical and demographic characteristics into account, the MoCA is a suitable screening tool-in an old age psychiatry setting-for distinguishing between those in need of further diagnostic investigations and those who are not but not for diagnosing cognitive impairment.