Objective: Diagnosing dementia can be difficult in persons with mild memory difficulties. We examine the usefulness of the CDR (Sum of Boxes) score, rather than the CDR Global score, as a tool in making a diagnosis of early dementia.
Design: A retrospective review of case records.
Materials and Methods: Clinical data recorded on the MIRA database were examined from all patients seen over a five year period at the Memory Clinic. Data were extracted from 384 episodes in which patients had scored 0.5 using the CDR (Global) rating scale. Incomplete data entries were excluded. We examined the relationship between CDR (Sum of Boxes) and Consensus Diagnosis of dementia using logistic regression.
Results: We found that increased CDR (Sum of Boxes) score was significantly associated with a higher probability of being assigned a consensus diagnosis of dementia (p<0.001). The odds ratio for the coefficient of CDR (Sum of Boxes) was 2.5 (95% CI 1.96,3.30), indicating that the likelihood of being diagnosed as having a dementia increased by a factor of 2.5 for every point increase on the CDR (Sum of Boxes) scale.
Conclusion: This data indicates that the CDR (Sum of boxes) score provides additional information to the CDR (Global) score in mild cases and may be helpful in making a diagnosis of dementia. The analysis allows us to explore the usefulness of this measure as an aid to diagnosis of dementia, particularly in mild cases.
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