BACKGROUND: There is increasing awareness of the importance of psychopathological and behavioural changes in dementia and a need for an instrument to measure these features which achieves an appropriate compromise between brevity and breadth. We describe a newly developed 59-item instrument: the MOUSEPAD. METHOD: Reliability, sensitivity and validity were examined with 30 carers, each of whom was interviewed four times over six weeks. RESULTS: For different symptom groups, kappa ranged from 0.43 to 0.93 for test-retest reliability, from 0.56 to 1.0 for inter-rater reliability, and from 0.43 to 0.67 for the validation study. CONCLUSIONS: The scale may be useful as an outcome measure in drug trials, for correlating psychopathological and behavioural changes with post-mortem findings, and in epidemiological surveys.
BACKGROUND: There is increasing awareness of the importance of psychopathological and behavioural changes in dementia and a need for an instrument to measure these features which achieves an appropriate compromise between brevity and breadth. We describe a newly developed 59-item instrument: the MOUSEPAD. METHOD: Reliability, sensitivity and validity were examined with 30 carers, each of whom was interviewed four times over six weeks. RESULTS: For different symptom groups, kappa ranged from 0.43 to 0.93 for test-retest reliability, from 0.56 to 1.0 for inter-rater reliability, and from 0.43 to 0.67 for the validation study. CONCLUSIONS: The scale may be useful as an outcome measure in drug trials, for correlating psychopathological and behavioural changes with post-mortem findings, and in epidemiological surveys.
Authors: Susan Jordan; Marie Ellenor Gabe-Walters; Alan Watkins; Ioan Humphreys; Louise Newson; Sherrill Snelgrove; Michael S Dennis Journal: PLoS One Date: 2015-10-13 Impact factor: 3.240