Clock drawing as an assessment tool for dementia

Abstract

Clock drawing has recently been shown to lie useful in differentiating Alzieimer's disease patients from normal controls. Our procedure for clock drawing differed from other published reports in that a copy condition was employed and patients were asked to set clock hands to read "ten after eleven". We found both clock drawing procedures to be correlated with tests related to executive and visuospatial functioning. In both conditions, nondemented controls performed significantly better than demented patients. In the command condition there was no difference between Alzheimer patients and patients with cerebrovascular dementia. In the copy condition, patients with cerebrovascular dementia performed significantly worse than Alzheimer patients. The inclusion of a copy condition appears to greatly expand the utility of this test. Although our scoring system did not differentiate between various dementing disorders in the command condition, if clock drawing is used as a screening instrument, lack of improvement in the copy condition in comparison to the command condition may be a sign of a vascular involvement.

The Cognitive Assessment Battery (CAB): a rapid test of cognitive domains

“…The naming test consists of 30 objects from the original Boston Naming Test (Kaplan and Weintraub, 1983) which were redrawn. The two clock drawing tests -one command condition and one copying -have been shown not only to differentiate between dementia and healthy controls but also between different dementia disorders (Libon et al, 1993). Short versions of the language comprehension Token Test have previously been reported to be sensitive measures of dementia (Taylor, 1998).…”

“…Even though most primary care centers today have specially trained dementia nurses, their resources in terms of instruments for reasonably thorough cognitive examinations are limited. Usually patients are tested with the Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE; Folstein et al, 1975), the clock test (Libon et al, 1993), and sometimes A Quick Test (AQT) (Nielsen et al, 2004). In addition, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA; Nasreddine et al, 2005) has in recent years been used in primary care to detect MCI and early dementia.…”

Cerebrolysin in Vascular Dementia: Improvement of Clinical Outcome in a Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Multicenter Trial

“…The secondary efficacy measures used in this study included the MMSE, 24 the ADCS-ADL (Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study-Activities of Daily Living), 25 the Trail-Making Test A, 26 and the Clock-Drawing Test, 27 all of which were administered by qualified investigators.…”

Neurocognitive Assessments in Advanced Heart Failure Patients Receiving Continuous-flow Left Ventricular Assist Devices

“…(1) visual-spatial perception, the Clock Drawing (CD) 32 (5) processing speed, Trail Making A (TM-A). 38 For visual-spatial perception measures, the CD is a graphic representation scored on a 1 to 10 (high being better) scale with unlimited time.…”