Apathy is commonly defined as a lack of interest, emotion and motivation. Apathy is reported to be frequent in patients with stroke, Parkinson's disease, traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease and depression In comparison with the neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) and other existing scales the Apathy Inventory (IA) was designed to provide a separate assessment of the emotional (Emotional blunting), behavioral (lack of initiative) and cognitive (lack of interest) aspects of apathy. The IA is based on the NPI model, and information can be obtained from the spouse or another person intimately familiar with the patient's behavior. Furthermore, the patient him/herself can also be evaluated by direct questioning. Methods : In this study, using the IA, we compared the apathy symptomatology in a population of 90 subjects with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), 33 subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 17 healthy elderly subjects. IA Internal consistency, item reliability, and between-rater reliability were high. A test-retest reliability study demonstrated that caregiver responses to IA questions were stable over short intervals. A concurrent validity study showed that the IA assesses apathy as effectively as the Neuro Psychiatric Inventory apathy domain. In the caregiver-based evaluation, Results : AD subjects had significantly higher IA scores than controls. The MCI patients' scores fell between those of the AD patients and the controls. With the patient-based evaluations, no differences were found among the AD, MCI and control groups. The results also indicated that AD patients had poor awareness of their emotional blunting and lack of initiative. In summary, the Apathy Inventory is a rapid and reliable method for assessing several dimensions of the apathetic syndrome
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