Dementia Screening
Dr. Bruno’s Original Post: DEMENTIA TEST CAUTION:
Be wary if your doc performs a quick mental status test and declares you have dementia. The “Word Finding” issues that often come with PPS fatigue will artificially push down your score on tests that are already inadequate to evaluate dementia.
Check out the topic of “Fatigue” in the Encyclopedia of Polio and PPS. You will find my articles about the Mental Status Exam and Word Finding Difficulty that you can share with your physician.
This is brief summary of an interesting article on this topic from Medscape.
Three Common Dementia Screens Faulty, Inaccurate
By Megan Brooks
November 30, 2018
“Three brief cognitive assessments often used in primary care settings to identify patients with cognitive impairment who could benefit from a full diagnostic workup for dementia are often inaccurate, new research shows.”
“The three tests are the Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE), which assesses orientation to time and place and the ability to remember words; the Memory Impairment Screen (MIS), which focuses on the ability to remember words; and Animal Naming (AN), which involves naming as many animals as possible in 60 seconds.”
"Our study found that all three tests often give incorrect results that may wrongly conclude that a person does or does not have dementia," study author David Llewellyn, PhD, of the University of Exeter Medical School, United Kingdom, said in a news release.
The study also found that each test has a different pattern of biases, so people are more likely to be misclassified by one test than another, depending on factors such as their age, education, and ethnicity.”