We developed a Japanese version of the Everyday Memory Checklist(EMC), which was originally made by Wilson et al. to assess everyday memory problems, and examined its reliability and validity in assessing brain-damaged patients with memory deficits.
Subjects and methods: The subjects consisted of 393 brain-damaged patients with memory deficits aged between 17 and 90 years with the mean MMSE of 24.6, and 132 control subjects aged between 19 and 86 years with the mean MMSE of 28.5. Patients' everyday memory problems were both self-evaluated and evaluated by their caregivers, while those of control subjects were only self-evaluated with the EMC.
Results: The test-retest reliability of the EMC evaluated in 149 randomly selected patients was acceptably high with intraclass correlation coefficient (0.950 for caregiver-evaluated scores and 0.759 for self-evaluated scores). The standard memory test scores were significantly correlated with the EMC scores of the patients evaluated by the caregivers; among them the scores of the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test were most highly correlated with the EMC scores. On the other hand, the scores of the non-memory cognitive test scores were not significantly correlated with the EMC scores. The self-evaluated EMC scores of the patients were significantly lower than those of the patients evaluated by the caregivers, and were not correlated with memory test scores or with non-memory cognitive test scores. As the EMC scores of control subjects over 60 years were significantly higher than the scores of the subjects under 59 years, we compared the EMC scores between the patients and the control subjects after we divided each subject into two groups depending on age. The EMC scores of the patients evaluated by the caregivers were significantly higher than the score of the control subjects in groups of both over 60 years and under 59 years. However, the self-evaluated EMC scores of the patient were not significantly higher than the EMC scores of the control subjects. In the analysis of the diagnostic accuracy, the EMC scores of the patients evaluated by the caregivers correctly classified 40.9% of patients and 92.9% of normal subjects by setting the cut-off scores of 14/15 in subjects under 59 years, and classified 50.2% of patients and 85.5% of normal subjects by setting the cut-off scores of 16/17 in subjects over 60 years.
Conclusion: When caregivers evaluated the amnesic patients, the Japanese version of the EMC is reliable and valid in assessing everyday memory problems.