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TUESDAY, Sept. 17, 2019 (HealthDay News) — Assessment of dementia risk using three common screening tools at baseline predicts incident dementia over the course of about seven years, according to a study published in the September\/October issue of the Annals of Family Medicine<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Lennard L. van Wanrooij, from the University of Amsterdam, and colleagues used data from 3,454 community-dwelling older persons who participated in the six- to eight-year Prevention of Dementia by Intensive Vascular Care trial to evaluate the associations between incident dementia, responses to a single question regarding subjective memory complaints (SMCs), and combined scores on two simple memory tests.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that SMCs alone were associated with future dementia (hazard ratio, 3.01), as were the Mini-Mental State Examination delayed recall item (MMSE-5; hazard ratio, 2.14) and the Visual Association Test (VAT; hazard ratio, 3.19) scores. During a median follow-up of 6.7 years, incident dementia ranged from 4 to 30 percent among persons with SMCs, depending on MMSE-5 and VAT scores. In patients with SMCs, the strength of the association between future dementia and an imperfect MMSE-5 score largely depended on the VAT score.<\/p>\n
“Assessing SMC in combination with the MMSE delayed recall item and the VAT appears to be a promising way to assess dementia risk in primary care,” the authors write.<\/p>\n