P1‐352: what can the mild behavioral impairment checklist (mbi‐c) tell us about cognition and behavior in parkinson's disease?

The Mild Behavioral Impairment Checklist (MBI-C) is a 34 item checklist clustered into 5 domains which measures the emergence in later life of sustained neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS). This checklist was developed as a case ascertainment instrument for mild behavioral impairment (MBI) (Ismail, 2017), which describes these NPS as a risk marker for incident cognitive decline and dementia in a pre-dementia population including those with normal cognition and MCI (Ismail, 2016). In order to further evaluate the MBI-C, it was administered to 44 people with Parkinson's disease (PD) with (PD-MCI) and without MCI (PD non-MCI). Additionally, these participants completed comprehensive neuropsychological testing which assessed global cognition, executive function, attention, processing speed, language, memory, and visuo-spatial function. All neuropsychological data were corrected for age, education and sex. All PD participants had disease severity Hoehn & Yahr II-III. Data analysis included Mann-Whitney test and Kendall's tau-b correlations using SPSS 25. There was a significant difference in MBI-C scores between the PD non-MCI and PD-MCI groups. The PD-MCI group had higher MBI-C scores than the PD-non MCI group (p=0.05). The PD-MCI and PD non-MCI groups differed in Parkinson's disease motor symptoms which were assessed using the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale. Within the PD-MCI group, higher MBI-C scores were correlated with lower scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), as well as memory and attention domains. Furthermore, there was a significant difference in attention, memory and motor symptoms between participants with low versus high MBI-C scores who met the cut-off point for MBI diagnosis. However, when motor symptoms are included as a co-variate in the analysis between low and high MBI-C scorers, the relationship is not significant but trending towards significance. Likely, a larger sample size will clarify this relationship further. This study provides support that the MBI-C is a clinically important tool to assess MBI as diagnostic and prognostic construct for cognitive decline in PD.