Validation of the Vietnamese-language Version of SATURN, the Public Domain Self-administered Cognitive Screening Test
Anna Truong1, Nina Nguyen1, Oanh Meyer2, David Bissig2
1UC Davis School of Medicine, 2UC Davis Neurology
Objective:
Expand the use of SATURN – a public domain self-administered cognitive screening test – in medically-underserved populations by validation of a Vietnamese-language version.
Background:
Dementia is underdiagnosed, especially in medically underserved populations. With the advent of new FDA-approved medications for Alzheimer’s dementia, improved screening for cognitive impairment across race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and linguistically diverse groups is necessary for equitable care. The English-language version of Self-Administered Tasks Uncovering Risk of Neurodegeneration (SATURN) was developed and validated as an inexpensive, freely available, and fully self-administered cognitive screening test. Because it is self-administered, versions in other languages might be rapidly deployed. We hypothesized that a Vietnamese-language version of SATURN would be strongly correlated with paper-and-pencil test results.
Design/Methods:
The Vietnamese-language SATURN will be administered to 40 participants as a sub-study of the Vietnamese Insights in Aging Program (VIP) study over a 12-month period. Participants’ SATURN scores will be compared to global measures of cognition assessed in VIP – the Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI), and formal neuropsychological assessment.
Results:
To-date, we have analyzed 20 participants who met prespecified inclusion criteria and have same-day CASI and SATURN scores; with a mean ± standard deviation age of 71.7±4.7 yr, and 10.3±3.4 yr years of education, and 60% were women. SATURN was strongly associated with CASI scores (r=0.67, p= 0.001). Education was correlated with CASI (r=0.60, p=0.006) but not with SATURN (r=0.38, p=0.10). Together, SATURN and education explained most of the variance in CASI (R2=0.53; main effects: p=0.007 for SATURN, p=0.03 for education).
Conclusions:
The freely-available and self-administered Vietnamese-language version of SATURN is strongly correlated with CASI. This unsupervised cognitive assessment can be deployed today to help meet the care needs of our linguistically diverse patient populations. Diagnostic superiority will be determined with comparison to formal neuropsychological assessment.