Designing a Brief Alzheimer Screen (BAS).

<bold>Context: </bold>With advances in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD), clinical focus has shifted to early patient identification. Memory recall tests and category fluency distinguish normal individuals from early AD patients.<bold>Objective: </bold>Develop a brief test for general practitioners to screen for AD. Design. Examination of items from the MMSE and category fluency.<bold>Setting and Participants: </bold>A Brief Alzheimer Screen (BAS) was developed from cognitive assessments on 406 normal subjects and 342 mild AD patients in the CERAD (Consortium to Establish a Registry for AD) dataset. The derived measure was then applied to a second validation sample.<bold>Main Outcome Measure: </bold>Logistic regression was used to derive a predictive equation, which was then applied to two validation samples to estimate sensitivity and specificity.<bold>Results: </bold>The resulting logistic model for discriminating between mild AD and controls included: recall of 3 words, number of animals named in 30 seconds, date, and spelling of WORLD backwards, (p < 0.001 for each) accounting for 77% of the variance. When applied to the validation samples, sensitivity and specificity were over 99% and 87%, respectively.<bold>Conclusions: </bold>These data support the use of the BAS as a potential screen of patients over 60 years of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]