Simple Dementia Screening Test Provides Valuable Information
Abstract
Simple Dementia Screening Test Provides Valuable InformationLeslie Sinclair Failure to identify the year or month correctly is a valuable single sign of cognitive impairment, with high specificity and sensitivity. What year is this? Screening elderly patients for dementia or delirium may be as simple as asking them this question, said researchers at the Department of Geriatric Medicine of the Merlin Park University Hospital in Galway, Ireland, in the May Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. They made this determination by evaluating a sample of patients aged 65 or older on the general medical wards of a university teaching hospital and among those attending the hospital's geriatric outpatient clinics from September 2009 to November 2009. They used two approaches to assess cognitive impairment, as measured by the severity of a subject's temporal disorientation. In the additive approach, a single error point was given for any error in year, month, date, day of the week, or time, and these were summed to give an overall score from 0 to 5. For the weighted approach, investigators calculated the Benton Temporal Orientation Scale (TOS). Each patient was assessed separately by two physicians on the same day (patients with major communication difficulties, those