Predicting everyday functional abilities of dementia patients with the Mini-Mental State Examination

The Mini-Mental State Examination is a widely used cognitive screening measure. The purpose of the present study was to assess how 5 specific clusters of Mini-Mental State Examination items (ie, subscores) correlate with and predict specific areas of daily functioning in dementia patients, 61 patients with varied forms of dementia were administered the Mini-Mental State Examination and an observation-based daily functional test (the Direct Assessment of Functional Status). The results revealed that the orientation and attention subscores of the Mini-Mental State Examination correlated most significantly with most functional domains. The Mini-Mental State Examination language items correlated with all but the shopping and time orientation tasks, while the Mini-Mental State Examination recall items correlated with the Direct Assessment of Functional Status time orientation and shopping tasks. Stepwise regression analyses found that among the Mini-Mental State Examination subscores, orientation was the single, best independent predictor of daily functioning.