Montreal Cognitive Assessment Hearing Impairment (MoCA-H): cross-cultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese.
Rochele Martins Machado, Karina Carlesso Pagliarin, Fernanda Soares Aurélio Patatt
PMID 39841742WHAT IT FOUND
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment for hearing impairment was adapted into Brazilian Portuguese.
Older adults with hearing loss struggled with visuospatial and abstract reasoning tasks. The test is now available for clinicians to screen cognition in this population.
Key findings
01The MoCA-H was successfully translated and adapted into Brazilian Portuguese through a six-stage process including translation, semantic analysis, and pilot testing.
02In the pilot study, participants had difficulty with tasks involving visuospatial skills, language, attention, and abstract reasoning, specifically the trails, cube, sentence construction, vigilance, and ruler-watch categorization.
03Participants reading instruction cards aloud focused on their reading fluency rather than the content, leading to execution errors where they responded before reading full instructions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is an adaptation and pilot, not a full validation. It did not compare MoCA-H scores to a gold-standard diagnosis or establish normative data. The pilot sample was small (n=30) and recruited from a single service in southern Brazil, limiting generalizability. Participants had to read instructions aloud, which may have introduced confounding effects from reading fluency or anxiety, as noted by the authors. The study did not report statistical measures of reliability or validity for the adapted instrument.
Declared interests
No conflicts of interest or funding sources were reported in the text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume the MoCA-H is validated for diagnosing dementia in Brazilian Portuguese speakers. This paper describes the adaptation and a small pilot study, but it does not provide diagnostic accuracy data or normative scores.