P3-023: Early detection of dementia: The use of the 12-item selective reminding test in Taiwan

Abstract

Memory impairment is often the first symptom of a dementing disorder and is central to the diagnosis of dementia. As the new treatments of dementia become available and more promising, the detection of dementia in the early stage of disease becomes more important. This study investigated the usefulness of the 12–item Selective Reminding Test (SRT) on the detection of early dementia in Taiwan. With a total of 482 subjects, age range from 65 to 92 (mean 75.67 ± 5.07) and education years ranging from 6 to 20 (mean 11.80 ± 3.69), who visited the Memory Clinic, Taipei Veterans General Hospital self–referred or referred by family for memory complaints were included. All the subjects were administered the 12–item SRT, Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI), and Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) except 7 subjects had Mini–Mental Status Examination (MMSE) instead of CASI. MMSE scores can be estimated from subjects' CASI scores. Among these subjects, 86 were diagnosed as Alzheimer's Disease (AD), 173 were Questionable Dementia (QD), and 223 were normal or subjective memory complaint (NL/SMC). All the subjects showed an increase in new learning from trial 1 to trial 6 on the SRT, with the NL/SMC subjects having a greater increase (from 5.1 to 9.5) than QD subjects (from 4.0 to 7.5) and AD subjects (from 2.6 to 4.8). The t–tests indicate statistically significant differences between any two diagnostic groups on each individual learning trial (p<0.001). There were also significant differences (p<0.01) for the 15–minute delayed free recall (DFR) among three diagnostic groups (NL/SMC 8.0 vs. QD 5.5 vs. AD 1.6). Similar results were shown on the CASI domain and total scores (CASI total score: NL/SMC 91.2 vs. QD 86.5 vs. AD 73.2) in differentiating the 3 studied groups. The QD subjects showed a greater % decrease on the SRT DFR score (31.3%) than on CASI total score (5.2%) and on MMSE score (5.7%) as compared with the NL/SMC subjects. These results indicate that the 12–item SRT is a more sensitive and useful test than CASI and MMSE in assessing subjects in the early stage of dementia.