Background: The Mild Behavioral Impairment Checklist (MBI-C), a screening scale for neuropsychiatric symptom evaluation, facilitates Alzheimer's disease (AD) screening. However, its validity and reliability for use as an AD screening tool have not been determined.
Objective: To develop an AD screening scale suitable for the Chinese population.
Methods: The MBI-C was translated into Chinese and back-translated with the original author's consent. Forty-six AD patients, attending the Xuanwu hospital memory clinic, and 50 sex- and education-matched controls from the community underwent a full neuropsychological evaluation, including MBI-C assessment. Among them, 15 AD patients were evaluated repeatedly, and eight were evaluated simultaneously by two different clinicians, to assess MBI-C reliability.
Results: The MBI-C demonstrated good internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, and inter-rater reliability. Its optimal cutoff point was 6/7 for identifying AD dementia, with a sensitivity of 86.96% and specificity of 86.00%, and its detection rate for moderate-severe AD dementia was higher than that of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory Questionnaire (NPI-Q). Pearson's correlation coefficients ranged from 0.702 to 0.831, indicating content validity. Seven factors were extracted during principal component analysis, with a cumulative contribution of 70.55%. Moreover, the Pearson's correlation coefficient was 0.758, indicating its criterion validity. The MBI-C could also distinguish AD dementia severity. MBI-C scores were significantly negatively correlated with MMSE and MoCA scores, and positively correlated with ADL scores.
Conclusion: This study showed that the Chinese version of MBI-C has high reliability and validity, and could replace the NPI-Q for AD dementia screening in the Chinese population.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; mild behavioral impairment checklist; neuropsychiatric inventory questionnaire; reliability; validity.