MANCHESTER AND OXFORD UNIVERSITIES SCALE FOR THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF DEMENTIA (MOUSEPAD)

Background. There is increasing awareness of the importance of psychop athological and behavioural changes in dementia and a need for an inst rument to measure these features which achieves an appropriate comprom ise between brevity and breadth. We describe a newly developed 59-item instrument: the MOUSEPAD. Method. Reliability, sensitivity and validi ty were examined with 30 carers, each of whom was interviewed four tim es over six weeks. Results. For different symptom groups kappa ranged from 0.43 to 0.93 for test-retest reliability, from 0.56 to 1.0 for in ter-rater reliability, and from 0.43 to 0.67 for the validation study. Conclusions. The scale may be useful as an outcome measure in drug tr ials, for correlating psychopathological and behavioural changes with post-mortem findings, and in epidemiological surveys.