title: Predicting everyday functional abilities of dementia patients with the Mini-Mental State Examination.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, California State University, Northridge, California 91330, USA. jill.razani@csun.edu
authors.forename: Jill
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Razani
authors.forename: Jennifer T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Natalia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Dafaeeboini
authors.forename: Terri
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Edwards-Lee
authors.forename: Po
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Cathy
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Alessi
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Josephson
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living / Q000523:psychology*; D000368:Aged; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D003704:Dementia / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D015577:Geriatric Assessment / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D009949:Orientation; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis