The data provide some support for the use of EQ-5D when interviewer administered. However, there are serious concerns regarding the validity of patient self-rated HRQL data obtained in this study and uncertainty exists regarding who the appropriate proxy should be, as different groups of proxies provide different results. It was not clear whether caregivers or physicians represent better proxies. Further research should focus on the comparison of caregivers and physicians as proxies.

There are measurement difficulties associated with the assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQL) in older people with dementia. The use of proxies is a commonly employed approach to overcome such problems. The research reported in this paper sought to identify, specifically for the EuroQol EQ-5D HRQL instrument, whether construct validity is greater for 'family caregivers' or 'clinicians' as two alternative sources of proxy information for patients with a diagnosis of dementia. This involved the exploration of the strength of the associations between clinical measures of illness severity and EQ-5D data. The data appear to reveal a pattern suggesting that the viewpoint of the proxy (i.e., clinician or family caregiver) is important. The findings suggest that the data provided by clinicians (when compared to data from carers) had higher construct validity for the more observable dimensions of the EQ-5D instrument (i.e., 'mobility' and 'self-care'). Conversely, the data from family carers had higher construct validity for the less observable dimensions (i.e., 'usual activities' and 'anxiety/depression'). Previous research on proxy provision of HRQL data has tended to focus on trying to identify a single proxy. The results of this study suggest that using carefully matched sets of measures and assessment perspectives may produce more valid EQ-5D health state descriptions.

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Pharmacological treatment of cerebrovascular disorders was introduced at the beginning of the 20th Century. Since then, a multitude of studies have focused on the development of a consensus for a well defined taxonomy of these disorders and on the identification of specific patterns of cognitive deficits associated with them, but with no clear consensus. Nevertheless, citicoline has proved to be a valid treatment in patients with a cerebrovascular pathogenesis for memory disorders. A metanalysis performed on the entire database available from the clinical studies performed with this compound confirms the experimental evidence from the animal studies which have repeatedly described the multiple biological actions of citicoline in restoring both the cell lipid structures and some neurotransmitter functions.