Detecting dementia with neuropsychological tests in elder individuals scoring more than 24 points on the MMSE

Naoko Kawano¹⁾, Yusuke Suzuki²⁾, Sayaka Yamamoto¹⁾, Akihisa Iguchi³⁾, Hiroyuki Umegaki¹⁾

¹⁾Department of Geriatrics, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine
²⁾Department of Outpatient and Home Medicine, Nagoya University Hospital.
³⁾Faculty of Medical Welfare, Aichi Shukutoku University

We carried out a retrospective study with an aim to examine neuropsychological features of older patients attending our memory clinic in their initial stage of cognitive decline (MMSE≥24), who were clinically diagnosed to have developed dementia, especially Alzheimer's type. As a result of inputting patient performance on 10 neuropsychological tests into the logit model adjusted by sex, age, education year, and GDS15 score, neuropsychological features of dementia were characterized by lower performance in the delayed recall trial of the ADAS10W-D, a letter fluency task, a digital span subtest of WAIS-R, and a copying task of Necker's cube in this study samples. In particular poor performance in the delayed recall trial of the ADAS10W-D was prominent in patients diagnosed as having dementia of Alzheimer's type.

Address correspondence to Dr. Naoko Kawano, Department of Geriatrics, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine (65 Tsurumai-Cho, Showa-Ku, Nagoya 466-8560, Japan)