A new approach to the measurement of cognitive deficits in dementia

Although scales developed for use with the general population and those developed for use with patients with dementia provide important assessment tools, there are certain questions that might best be answered by cognitive scales that span the range of difficulty from that of the healthy older adult through that of the patient with mild to moderate dementia. To address this need, six cognitive scales are being constructed by using data from both healthy older adult and probable Alzheimer populations in item development and analysis. It is anticipated that these scales will be useful in addressing questions about patterns of deficits in dementias of different etiologies, progression or improvement of function in demented patients, and relationships between cognition and other variables in cognitively impaired patients.