Journal of Alzheimers Disease & Parkinsonism
Open Access

Research Article

Dementia Assessment by Rapid Test (DART): An Indian Screening T ool for Dementia

Swati B¹, Sreenivas V², Manjari T³ and Ashima N^1*

¹Department of Clinical Neuropsychology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India

²Bio-Statistics, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India

³Neurology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India

Corresponding Author:

Ashima Nehra
Department of Clinical Neuropsychology
All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India
Tel: 011-26546437
E-mail: ashimanwadhawan@ gmail.com

Received date: September 25, 2015; Accepted date: November 26, 2015; Published date: December 03, 2015

Citation: Swati B, Sreenivas V, Manjari T, Ashima N (2015) Dementia Assessment by Rapid Test (DART): An Indian Screening Tool for Dementia. J Alzheimers Dis Parkinsonism 5:198. doi: 10.4172/2161-0460.1000198

Copyright: © 2015 Swati B, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Background: There is a need to develop a quick original screening test for dementia due to paucity of short, education and culture fair tests. Hence, following DSM-V criteria, a quick screening test was developed which can be used for both the clinical and prognostic purposes. Objective: Develop a quick and valid Indian screening test for geriatric population for early and timely identification of cognitive decline. Method: Total sample consisted of 150 (88=patients and 62=control) right-handed, consenting subjects between 55-84 yrs of age with minimum elementary education were recruited in the study. Results: DART scores discriminated between dementia cases and controls clearly. It was also validated against gold standard of MMSE, with sensitivity of 95.5% and specificity of 60.0%; true positive predictive value of 70.2% and true negative predictive value of 93.0%. Conclusion: DART is a quick and valid screening test for dementia for Indian population.

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