[Development of a scale for assessing lack of motivation in elderly persons]

Apathy is made of depression and of loss of motivation. For patients with senile dementia of Alzheimer-type, the MMS score is inversely correlated with apathy and depression. The aim of this study is to build a scale aimed at loss of motivation and validated for elderly people.

The study was performed on 44 non-demented elderly people, 54 outpatients with dementia, mainly Alzheimer's type. After agreement of the patients and the family, patients were assessed using different scales: Cornell's for depression, Marin's for apathy, MMS for cognitive disorders. At the same time, we tested with caregivers a 21 items indirect scale listing various disorders related to loss of motivation, scored from 1 to 4: very often, often, sometimes, never. Patients were retested by 7 different caregivers, and different investigators, immediately and a month later to evaluate reproducibility, temporal stability using Cohen's Kappa and Spearman coefficients. The demotivation scale was then correlated with the other scales and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was studied.

The 44 non-demented people were 80.25 years old +/- 7.75. 54 demented patients were included: 15 men and 39 women. The mean age was 81.47 years +/- 8.03. As Cohen's Kappa and Spearman coefficients were not sufficient for 6 items, the scale was reduced to 15 items (Presented). The depression scale is strongly and significantly correlated with the Marin's apathy scale. Internal coherence is particularly significant: Cronbach's alpha coefficient = 0.91. For the 54 patients with dementia, the depression score worsens significantly as cognitive disorders worsen. In these patients Marin's scale shows a progression of apathy with the impairment observed in MMS, but the MMS is not correlated with the score at the demotivation scale. So this latter scale seems to measure something close but independent from apathy.

The loss of motivation is a frequent behavioral disorder in old patients. Loss of motivation can be present in any chronic disease with asthenia. This disorder is frequent in depression, in dementia and even in endocrine disease, for instance hyperthyroidism. It triggers a loss of commitment of old people and paves the way for the loss of autonomy. Apathy is a loss of motivation associated with an affective blunting. Demotivation is congruent with the actual presence of apathy in patients as measured using Marin's scale that has been used as a standard in this study. This paper presents a methodology for an evaluation scale aimed at the loss of motivation in old people. A psychologist and seven different caregivers working in a day care hospital on 98 patients performed an indirect assessment. An estimation of specificity, sensibility, reproducibility and homogeneity was tested with appropriate techniques. The results obtained with this scale answer the preliminary methodological queries, allowing us to trigger further researches for a final validation. According to our results, demotivation does not increase with age neither in demented nor in non-demented patients. Conversely, the aggravation of cognitive disorders in dementia is associated with increasing demotivation and depression. The loss of motivation participates to the learnt and acquired helplessness. Its care is necessarily global, using pharmacological, psychological and sociotherapeutic treatment.

EAD scale appears a reliable tool to assess loss of motivation in old and very old patients.