Comparison of Dementia Criteria: Sensitivity and Specificity Testing among African American Patients

摘要

We compared the sensitivity and specificity of recently proposed general dementia, vascular dementia, and Alzheimer''s disease criteria using the DSM III-R as the ''gold standard'' among 61 elderly African American patients. There were 10 patients with vascular dementia, 20 with Alzheimer''s disease and 31 controls. Comparison of the sensitivity and specificity of the various criteria showed that with few exceptions, the results were similar. Additional studies of this kind among different populations, and among mild dementia patients, are needed to cross-validate the results.