The six-item screener is a brief and reliable instrument for identifying subjects with cognitive impairment and its diagnostic properties are comparable to the full MMSE. It can be administered by telephone or face-to-face interview and is easily scored by a simple summation of errors.

clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00246896.

It is often required to evaluate the accuracy of a new diagnostic test against a standard test with unknown error rates. If the two tests are applied simultaneously to the same individuals from two populations with different disease prevalences, then assuming conditional independence of the errors of the two tests, the error rates of both tests and the true prevalences in both populations can be estimated by a maximum likelihood procedure. Generalizations to several tests applied in several populations are also possible.

The acceleration of incidence rates for AD and dementia slows down with the increase in age, although we find no evidence of a rate decline. Women are at higher risk of developing AD than men.