French translation and normation of the Parkinson Neuropsychometric Dementia Assessment (PANDA).

Abstract Introduction Cognitive impairment and depressive symptoms caused by Parkinson's disease (PD) are often underestimated in routine clinical practice, partly due to the lack of short screening tests. The “Parkinson Neuropsychometric Dementia Assessment” (PANDA) is a new convenient tool, validated in German, to assess cognition in PD. It consists of five cognitive tasks and a brief mood questionnaire, and is designed for the early detection of mild cognitive deficits as well as dementia. Aims To translate the PANDA into French and provide normative data for a French speaking population. Methods The translation was made by means of the translation/re-translation method. The normation was conducted with 61 control subjects (CS). The Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) was administered concurrently. A comparison was made with the original study's control group (CG) to determine whether the German algorithms for converting the raw scores could also be used with the French version or whether a new procedure had to be developed. All statistics were conducted with SPSS Statistics18. Results There is a significant correlation between the PANDA total score and MMSE ( r  = 0.42, p  = 0.001). Analysis of the total converted scores shows no significant correlation with age ( r  = − 0.19; p  = 0.14). After correction for education, there is no significant difference between our CS and the original study's CG ( t  = 1.50; p  = 0.14). Conclusions Our results indicate that the PANDA French translation can be used with the same transformation algorithms as the German version, when adding a correction for education.