A cognitive screening battery for dementia in the elderly.

The objective of this study is to propose a screening instrument for dementia based on a reduced number of neuropsychological tests. The sample consists in the pooled data of the five follow-up visits of the Paquid cohort study on cerebral aging: the estimation sample included 2792 subjects (8830 observations) and the validation sample included 985 subjects (2643 observations). Among scores significantly associated with dementia, we retained only those that increased the specificity of the model for a sensitivity of one. Seven neuropsychological tests and the MMSE subscores were considered. The most discriminant combination of tests included the MMSE and the subscores "orientation to time" and "recall three objects," the Benton Visual Retention Test, and Isaacs' Set Test of verbal fluency. The specificity of this screening instrument was 0. 77 for a sensitivity of 1.