The Cognitive & Leisure Activity Scale (CLAS): A new measure to quantify cognitive activities in older adults with and without cognitive impairment.

Introduction: Potentially modifiable dementia risk factors include diet and physical and cognitive activity. However, there is a paucity of scales to quantify cognitive activities. To address this, we developed the Cognitive & Leisure Activity Scale (CLAS).

Methods: The CLAS was validated in 318 consecutive individuals with and without cognitive impairment. Psychometric properties were compared with sample characteristics, disease stage, and etiology.

Results: The CLAS has very good data quality (Cronbach alpha: 0.731; 95% confidence interval: 0.67-0.78). CLAS scores correlated with gold standard measures of cognition, function, physical functionality, behavior, and caregiver burden. CLAS scores were positively correlated with other resilience factors (eg, diet, physical activity) and negatively correlated with vulnerability factors (eg, older age, frailty).

Discussion: The CLAS is a brief inventory to estimate dosage of participation in cognitive activities. The CLAS could be used in clinical care to enhance cognitive activity or in research to estimate dosage of activities prior to an intervention.