The Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural ALS Screen (ECAS) has been developed to assess cognition and behaviour in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Cognitive impairments of ALS-specific and ALS-non-specific functions can be determined using cut-off scores based on performance of healthy subjects. However, detailed analyses show that older healthy subjects perform worse than younger ones, whereas highly-educated individuals perform better than those with lower education levels. As a consequence, this study presents new age and education matched cut-off scores for the revised German/Swiss-German version of the ECAS based on the performance of 86 healthy subjects.
Keywords: ECAS; German; amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; cognition; cut-off; executive; stratified; validation.