Effective screening for Alzheimer's disease among older African Americans.
Relatively little data exist concerning the utility of brief cognitive measures to detect dementia among African Americans. The current study evaluated the clinical utility of the Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) and the Fuld Object Memory Evaluation (FOME) in detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) among both African American and European American older adults. One hundred and forty geriatric patients from a large urban academic medical center were examined. Overall, the FOME appeared to be more effective in detecting AD than was the MMSE (93% sensitivity vs. 75% sensitivity, respectively), although both measures suffered from relatively low specificity (63.5) in the full sample. The FOME demonstrated exceptional clinical utility among African American patients (sensitivity 98.3%; specificity = 64.5; positive predictive power 83.8%; negative predictive power 95.2%). The results of this study support the use of the FOME among older African Americans to detect dementia.
Mast
B T
BT
Institute of Gerontology & Department of Psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA. bmast@wayne.edu
Fitzgerald
J
J
Steinberg
J
J
MacNeill
S E
SE
Lichtenberg
P A
PA
D001741:Black or African American / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening; D008609:Mental Status Schedule / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008824:Michigan; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data