A Comparison of Three types of Trail Making Test in the Korean Elderly: Higher Completion Rate of Trail Making Test-Black and White for Mild Cognitive Impairment

Objective: A Korean version of Trail Making Test (TMT) led to reduced clinical use in Korea because of lower completion rate. The current study examines multiple TMT versions in effort to identify which type might accurately detect cognitive decline with higher completion rate. Methods: Three versions of TMT including the original TMT, TMT-Korean Letter (TMT-K), and TMT-Black and White (TMT-B&W) were utilized. A total of 62 participants were included, comprised of 30 cognitively normal controls (NC) and 32 mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Three TMT versions were administered to subjects with other neuropsychological tests. Results: TMT-B&W completion time as well as that of Original TMT and TMT-K was successful in distinguishing MCI from NC adjusted for age, sex and educational level. TMT-B&W also showed a high correlation with other neuropsychological tests that represent frontal executive function. Regarding completion rate in MCI patients, Original TMT and TMT-K were not successfully completed (62% and 60.6%, respectively) compared with TMT-B&W (90.1%). Conclusion: As TMT-B&W showed higher completion rate than others and revealed significant correlation with frontal executive function, this culture-fair measure can vitalize TMT task with increased applicability in Korean elderly adults who are unfamiliar with the sequence of English or Korean alphabet. *Corresponding author: SangYun Kim, Department of Neurology, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, 300 Gumi-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si, 463-707, Republic of Korea, Tel: +82 31 787 7462; E-mail: [email protected] Received May 25, 2016; Accepted May 30, 2016; Published June 07, 2016 Citation: Kim K, Jang JW, Baek MJ, Kim SY (2016) A Comparison of Three types of Trail Making Test in the Korean Elderly: Higher Completion Rate of Trail Making Test-Black and White for Mild Cognitive Impairment. J Alzheimers Dis Parkinsonism 6: 239. doi: 10.4172/2161-0460.1000239 Copyright: © 2016 Kim K, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The aims of the current study were 1) to validate the new versions of TMT-B&W in effort to maximize test-taker performance, and 2) to administer the three versions of these tests in older Korean healthy and patient with cognitively impaired subjects, to distinguish groups at the stage of mild cognitive impairment. Materials and Methods