Effective Screening for Alzheimers Disease Among Older African Americans

Abstract

Relatively little data exist concerning the utility of brief cognitive measures to detect dementia among African Americans. The current study evaluated the clinical utility of the Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) and the Fuld Object Memory Evaluation (FOME) in detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) among both African American and European American older adults. One hundred and forty geriatric patients from a large urban academic medical center were examined. Overall, the FOME appeared to be more effective in detecting AD than was the MMSE (93% sensitivity vs. 75% sensitivity, respectively), although both measures suffered from relatively low specificity (63.5) in the full sample. The FOME demonstrated exceptional clinical utility among African American patients (sensitivity 98.3%; specificity = 64.5; positive predictive power 83.8%; negative predictive power 95.2%). The results of this study support the use of the FOME among older African Americans to detect dementia.

Clinical validity of Fuld Object Memory Evaluation to screen for dementia in a Chinese society

“…Consistent with previous studies (La Rue, 1989;Marcopulos et al, 1999;Mast et al, 2001;Wall et al, 1998), participants' performance on FOME was not influenced by the level of education, regardless of the level of cognitive functioning. The sample of this study had a fairly similar distribution across the three levels of education, albeit there were a higher proportion of participants in the dementia group who did not have any education.…”

“…Besides, they are similar to those obtained in overseas studies. Mast et al (2001) proposed a cutoff score of 30 for TR in a community elderly sample that comprised of American Africans and European Africans. Marcopulos et al (1999) reported that a cutoff score of 8 for DR demonstrated good ability to differentiate geriatric patients with dementia from community normal controls and patients with psychiatric disorders.…”

“…These three indices were reported as useful indicators to estimate the memory functioning of older individuals with dementia (Fuld, 1981;Masur et al, 1994;Marcopulos et al, 1999). The scores of TR and DR were used in this study to estimate the discriminative power of FOME (Masur et al, 1994;Marcopulos et al, 1999;Mast et al, 2001).…”

“…The scores derived from the total items recalled in the five trials and in the delayed recall trial were shown having good discriminative ability to differentiate dementia from normal cognitive function (Fuld et al, 1988;La Rue et al, 1999;Marcopulos and Mclain, 2003). Using 30 as cut-off for the total retrieval score, the FOME achieved 93% sensitivity and 64% specificity for the detection of dementia among African American and European American older adults (Mast et al, 2001).…”

Demografik verilerin nöropsikolojik testler üzerine etkisi

“…Literatürde kognitif yaşlanmanın 20-30 lu yaşlarda başladığı gösterilmiş olsa da, çoğu çalışma 60 yaş üstüne odaklanmıştır 10 22 . Bizim çalışmamızda benzer şekilde MMSE ile eğitim arasında pozitif korelasyon gözlenmekle birlikte, MMSE ile yaş arasında negatif korelasyon gözlenmiştir.…”