Evaluation mental disorders

Remote assessments of individuals with a neurological disease via telemedicine have the potential to reduce some of the burdens associated with clinical care and research participation. We aim to evaluate the feasibility of conducting the Montreal Cognitive Assessment remotely in individuals with movement disorders. A pilot study derived from two telemedicine trials was conducted. In total, 17 individuals with movement disorders (8 with Parkinson disease and 9 with Huntington disease) had Montreal Cognitive Assessment examinations evaluated in-person and remotely via web-based video conferencing to primarily determine feasibility and potential barriers in its remote administration...

OBJECTIVES: Validated screening tests for dementia in Arabic are lacking. Given the low levels of education among elderly in the Middle East and North Africa region, the commonly used screening instrument, the Mini Mental State Examination, is not best suited. Alternatively, the Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale (RUDAS) was especially designed to minimize the effects of cultural learning and education. The aim of this study was to validate the RUDAS in the Arabic language (A-RUDAS), evaluate its ability to screen for mild and moderate dementia, and assess the effect of education, sex, age, depression, and recruitment site on its performance...

An aging global population is driving the current epidemic of dementia and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Diabetes is a known risk factor for the development of vascular dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and mild cognitive impairment. Good control of diabetes may improve cognitive decline and prevent Alzheimer's disease. Mild cognitive impairment with type 2 diabetes (DM-MCI) often presents as a decline in attention, psychomotor speed, executive function, and memory. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is one of the best screening tools for detecting DM-MCI...

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Existing cognitive measures for moderate-to-severe dementia have shown floor effects and an inability to assess the remaining cognitive function, especially for profound dementia. METHODS: We constructed the Cognitive Test for Severe Dementia (CTSD), which consists of 13 items covering 7 cognitive domains, and examined its reliability and validity. RESULTS: Cronbach's α in severe dementia participants was 0.896. Interrater and test-retest reliability were 0...

To investigate the utility of the Severe Impairment Rating Scale (SIRS) as a cognitive assessment tool among nursing home residents with advanced dementia, we conducted a cross-sectional study of 96 residents in 3 nursing homes with Functional Assessment Staging Test (FAST) stage 6a and above. We compared the discriminatory ability of SIRS with the Chinese version of Mini-Mental State Examination, Abbreviated Mental Test, and Clock Drawing Test. Among the cognitive tests, SIRS showed the least "floor" effect and had the best capacity to distinguish very severe (FAST stages 7d-f) dementia (area under the curve 0...

BACKGROUND: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a transitional stage between normal aging and dementia. Persons with MCI are at higher risk to develop dementia. Identifying MCI from normal aging has become a priority area of research. Neuropsychological assessment could help to identify these high risk individuals. OBJECTIVE: To examine clinical utility and diagnostic accuracy of neuropsychological measures in identifying MCI. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study of 42 participants (22 patients with MCI and 20 normal controls [NC]) between the age of 60 and 80 years...

OBJECTIVE: The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a cognitive screening instrument growing in popularity, but few studies have conducted psychometric item analyses or attempted to develop abbreviated forms. We sought to derive and validate a short-form MoCA (SF-MoCA) and compare its classification accuracy to the standard MoCA and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer disease (AD), and normal aging. METHODS: 408 subjects (MCI n = 169, AD n = 87, and normal n = 152) were randomly divided into derivation and validation samples...

BACKGROUND: Validated cognitive screening tools for use in urban and regional Aboriginal populations in Australia are lacking. METHODS: In a cross-sectional community-based study, 235 participants were assessed on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale (RUDAS) and an urban modification of the Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment (mKICA). Performance on these cognitive screening tools was compared to dementia diagnosis by clinical consensus...

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the effectiveness of two cognitive screening measures, the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), in predicting driving test outcome for individuals with and without cognitive impairment. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. SETTING: A clinical driving evaluation program at a teaching hospital in the United States. PARTICIPANTS: Adult drivers who underwent assessment with the MMSE and MoCA as part of a comprehensive driving evaluation between 2010 and 2014 (N=92)...

Inadequate effort during neuropsychological examination results in inaccurate representations of an individual's true abilities and difficulties. As such, performance validity tests (PVTs) are strongly recommended as standard practice during adult-based evaluations. One concern with using PVTs with children is that failure reflects immature cognitive ability rather than non-credible effort. The current study examined performance on the Medical Symptom Validity Test (MSVT) in two large pediatric clinical samples with strikingly different neuropsychological profiles: (1) mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI; n = 510) and (2) fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD; n = 120)...

This study examined the utility of the Word Memory Test (WMT) as a measure of verbal episodic memory by comparing select WMT subtests to the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) First and Second Editions (CVLT-II) across two samples. Correlations between the WMT and CVLT/CVLT-II subtests were statistically significant in the expected direction. Effect sizes were examined to assess the degree to which the WMT memory subtests and the CVLT First Edition subtests discriminated between groups of people who would be expected to differ from each other in verbal memory abilities...

OBJECTIVE: The increasing population of elderly people in Japan has accelerated the demand for a simple screening test to detect cognitive and affective declines in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and the early stage of dementia. Methods We compared the cognitive and affective functions, activities of daily living (ADLs) and the results of four computerized touch-panel screening tests in 41 MCI subjects, 124 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 75 age- and gender-matched normal controls...

AIMS: To pilot a neuropsychological battery for diagnosing dementia and provide normative scores in an elderly Sri Lankan sample. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Consecutive subjects over the age of 60 yrs were administered tests assessing the individual domains of language, verbal episodic memory, visual perceptuospatial skills and executive functions in the Sinhala language. RESULTS: There were a total of 230 subjects in the final sample. The mean age of the entire sample was 69 years, mean education level was 12 years and the sample comprised 53% female...

BACKGROUND: Cognitive impairment often goes undetected in older people in hospital. Efficient screening tools are required to improve detection. To determine diagnostic properties of two separate informant-based single screening questions for cognitive impairment (dementia and delirium) in hospitalised older people. METHODS: Patients over 65 years non-electively admitted to medical or geriatric wards within a teaching hospital. Our index tests were single screening questions (SSQ), one for dementia ("How has your relative/friend's memory changed over the past 5 years (up to just before their current illness)?") and one for delirium ("How has your relative/friend's memory changed with his/her current illness?"), which were assessed with informant response given on a five point Likert scale...

Important challenges for the diagnosis and monitoring of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) include the development of plasma biomarkers for assessing neurologic injury, monitoring pathogenesis, and predicting vulnerability for the development of untoward neurologic outcomes. While several biomarker proteins have shown promise in this regard, used individually, these candidates lack adequate sensitivity and/or specificity for making a definitive diagnosis or identifying those at risk of subsequent pathology...

BACKGROUND: There are currently only a few performance tests that assess the capacity to perform activities of daily living. These measures frequently require a long time to administer, are strongly cognition oriented, or have not been adequately validated. METHODS: The Erlangen Test of Activities of Daily Living in Mild Dementia (ETAM) was developed in a 4-phase process that was based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF)...

The McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) aims to measure sensory, affective, and evaluative dimensions of pain. However, the structural dimensionality of the MPQ remains somewhat uncertain. Exploratory (EFA) factor analyses were used to investigate the structure of the MPQ based on the responses of a diverse sample of 448 pain patients (M age = 43.1 yr., SD = 19.3). The EFA employed a methodologically sound iterative maximum-likelihood procedure, together with direct oblimin oblique simple structure rotation. Perusal of the 3-, 4-, and 5-factor solutions suggested that the MPQ measures two separate sensory dimensions of pain, while affective and evaluative dimensions were not sharply delineated, suggesting that the MPQ structure requires some revision...

UNLABELLED: A randomized, double-blinded, placebo controlled crossover study was conducted in 16 patients with painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy to assess the short-term efficacy and tolerability of inhaled cannabis. In a crossover design, each participant was exposed to 4 single dosing sessions of placebo or to low (1% tetrahydrocannabinol [THC]), medium (4% THC), or high (7% THC) doses of cannabis. Baseline spontaneous pain, evoked pain, and cognitive testing were performed. Subjects were then administered aerosolized cannabis or placebo and the pain intensity and subjective "highness" score was measured at 5, 15, 30, 45, and 60 minutes and then every 30 minutes for an additional 3 hours...

OBJECTIVE: We sought to compare age-related performance on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) across the adult lifespan in an asymptomatic, presumably normal, sample. BACKGROUND: The MMSE is the most commonly used brief cognitive screening test; however, the MoCA may be better at detecting early cognitive dysfunction. METHODS: We gave the MMSE and MoCA to 254 community-dwelling participants ranging in age from 20 to 89, stratified by decade, and we compared their scores using the Wilcoxon signed rank test...

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether scores from 2 commonly used cognitive screening tests can help predict general intellectual functioning in older adults. BACKGROUND: Cutoff scores for determining cognitive impairment have been validated for both the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). However, less is known about how the 2 measures relate to general intellectual functioning as measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV)...