Clinical utility of CERAD neuropsychological battery in elderly Jamaicans

Information on the clinical utility of neuropsychological tests in non-North-American samples is limited. We examined the diagnostic efficacy of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) neuropsychological battery in Jamaican men and women age 65 and older. A total of 72 elders were diagnosed as normal and 12 were demented based on history, physical, and neurological examination. Independent of this medical examination, participants were tested with the CERAD battery. Normal controls scored significantly better than dementia patients on all tests in the CERAD battery. A discriminant function found that a combination of Word List Learning Sum Recall and Boston Naming Test correctly classified a total of 81% of the cases (83% of the dements and 81% of the normal controls). This study is the first to demonstrate the clinical utility of the CERAD neuropsychological battery in the differential diagnosis of memory disorders of the aged in a non-North-American sample.