[Sandoz Clinical Assessment Geriatric Scale: a transcultural factor-analytic study]

To date only a few scales claimed to be valid and reliable exist that are designed to assess symptoms and signs of mental deterioration in the aging patient. One such scale, the SCAG, was presented by Venn et al. in the early seventies in the USA as an instrument designed to provide a picture of the cognitive, affective, social and somatic functions of the patient and to measure the effects induced by geriatric drugs on this picture. It consists of 18 items that have to be rated on a scale from 1 to 7. Along with the English original, German and French translations of this scale have been widely used in clinical trials in Europe. Their properties would not be assumed to be the same, especially when they are used in countries with different cultural backgrounds. Thus, a comparative study of the construct validity (by means of factor analyses) of the English, German and French versions of the SCAG, using 5 samples from different European countries, has been performed. As reference served a factor analysis of the SCAG based on 1165 pre-treatment values from 21 American trials. In all but one sample essentially the same structure with five factors emerged (in one case two factors were confounded).