Cognitive assessment of older primary care patients with and without memory complaints.

BACKGROUND: Dementia screening is currently recommended only for symptomatic patients.
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate memory complaints, a mental status test, and several cognitive tests as dementia screens in primary care.
DESIGN: Cross-sectional clinical epidemiologic study. PARTICIPANTS: Three hundred thirty-nine comprehensively assessed, primary care patients aged > or = 65 years. MEASUREMENTS: Memory complaints were abstracted from chart review. Scores on Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and domain-specific cognitive testing were compared to a dementia diagnosis based on Clinical Dementia Rating score > or = 1, and areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) were calculated. Classification and regression tree analyses were performed on memory complaints and tests with the highest AUCs.
RESULTS: Of 33 patients with dementia, only 5 had documented memory complaints. In 25 patients with documented memory complaints, no cognitive tests further improved identification of the 5 with dementia. In 28 patients with dementia but without memory complaints, an MMSE score < 20 identified 8 cases; among those with MMSE scores 20-21, a visual memory test identified a further 11 cases. Further cognitive testing could not detect 9 dementia cases without memory complaints and with MMSE scores > or = 22.
CONCLUSIONS: In older primary care patients with memory complaints, cognitive screening does not help identify those who require further examination for dementia. Most patients with dementia do not report memory complaints. In these asymptomatic individuals, general mental status testing, supplemented by a memory test when the mental status score is equivocal, will identify lower-scoring patients who need dementia assessment. However, high-scoring asymptomatic dementia cases will remain undetected.