Cochrane: With the aging of our populations there are increasing numbers of older adults with memory complaints and possible dementia. Identifying older adults who have dementia is important in order to help with planning their care needs and starting dementia specific treatments.
In order to diagnose dementia, healthcare professionals or other service providers rely on tests of memory and other areas of cognition in combination with additional investigations. Brief memory tests, such as the Mini-Cog, may be useful as screening tests to help identify those individuals that might benefit from further evaluation in order to determine if dementia is present. The Mini-Cog is a brief cognitive test that involves an assessment of an older person's ability to recall three words and draw a clock. In this review, we searched medical literature databases to identify studies which evaluated how well the Mini-Cog is able to distinguish between individuals who have dementia and those who do not have dementia when compared to in-depth evaluation by dementia specialists. Our review focussed on those studies that were conducted in community based settings. We identified three unique randomised controlled studies that evaluated the Mini-Cog. In these studies the accuracy of the Mini-Cog varied and importantly there were some potential limitations within the studies which may have led to an overestimation of the accuracy of the Mini-Cog. Based on the information that we obtained from our review, we felt that further research into the accuracy of the Mini-Cog was required before it could be recommended for routine use for identifying dementia in community settings.
In order to diagnose dementia, healthcare professionals or other service providers rely on tests of memory and other areas of cognition in combination with additional investigations. Brief memory tests, such as the Mini-Cog, may be useful as screening tests to help identify those individuals that might benefit from further evaluation in order to determine if dementia is present. The Mini-Cog is a brief cognitive test that involves an assessment of an older person's ability to recall three words and draw a clock. In this review, we searched medical literature databases to identify studies which evaluated how well the Mini-Cog is able to distinguish between individuals who have dementia and those who do not have dementia when compared to in-depth evaluation by dementia specialists. Our review focussed on those studies that were conducted in community based settings. We identified three unique randomised controlled studies that evaluated the Mini-Cog. In these studies the accuracy of the Mini-Cog varied and importantly there were some potential limitations within the studies which may have led to an overestimation of the accuracy of the Mini-Cog. Based on the information that we obtained from our review, we felt that further research into the accuracy of the Mini-Cog was required before it could be recommended for routine use for identifying dementia in community settings.
Authors' conclusions:
There
are currently few studies assessing the diagnostic test accuracy of the
Mini-Cog in community settings. The limited number of studies and the
methodological limitations that are present in the current studies make
it difficult to provide recommendations for or against the use of the
Mini-Cog as a cognitive screening test in community settings. Additional well-designed studies comparing the Mini-Cog to other brief cognitive screening tests are required in order to determine the accuracy and utility of the Mini-Cog in community based settings.