Trends in referred patient profiles in a memory clinic over 20 years

The increasing numbers of people with dementia in the UK, as well as the associated costs have led to an effort to improve dementia services for the benefit of patients, caregivers and the taxpayer. These efforts have frequently emphasised the importance of early diagnosis in dementia care. We sought to test the hypotheses that the mean cognitive score of new referrals to a secondary care memory assessment service increased while mean age decreased over a period of 20 years. We retrospectively analysed the data of 1476 patients. The passage of time was associated with a significant increase in mean cognitive scores, while there was no association between time and age after controlling for other factors. We suggest that memory services need to be designed to meet the needs of less cognitively impaired patients. In practice this means that using simple screening tests is not sufficient in this group of patients.