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Objective: Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) complaints as the early manifestation of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may be harbingers of objective cognitive decline. SCD-questinnaire9 (SCD-Q9) is developed to investigate the early sign for MCI. However, few studies have reported its power for discriminating MCI from healthy controls (HCs). Therefore, this study aims to investigate the discrimination power of SCD-Q9 as a brief screening tool for early detection of SCD in MCI. Methods: 84 HCs and 205 people with MCI were recruited. Their demographic information and scores of SCD-Q9 were compared. A binary logistic regression model was used to analyze the potential affecting factors of MCI, and the Receiver Operating Characteristic analysis was applied to test the discrimination powers of those factors, including SCD-Q9. Results: (1) Single and total scores of SCD-Q9 were all lower in the MCI group than those in the HC group. (2) Ageing, lower education and higher total scores of SCD-Q9 were associated with MCI. (3) Area Under the Curves (AUC) of SCD-Q9 for discriminating MCI from HC group was 0.815 and when integrating age and education, the AUC improved slightly and reached 0.839. Additionally, the sensitivity and specificity were 68.8% and 85.7%, respectively when a cut-off value of 3 was applied. Conclusions: SCD-Q9 may be able to detect the subjective cognitive decline in MCI early, but it may be used together with other screening questionnaires to improve its sensitivity and further verification of its power is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]