RELIABILITY OF NINDS-AIREN CLINICAL-CRITERIA FOR THE DIAGNOSIS OF VASCULAR DEMENTIA

We evaluated the reliability of clinical diagnoses using the recently standardized criteria for the diagnosis of vascular dementia (VaD) dev eloped by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the Association Internationale pour la Recherche et l'Ense ignement en Neurosciences (AIREN). Two neurologists and two psychiatri sts independently reviewed clinical data abstracted from those of 42 d emented subjects participating in a longitudinal study of dementia at the University of Pittsburgh. For each patient we abstracted the clini cal data on a standardized form. Each physician diagnosed each case ac cording to the NINDS-AIREN criteria, using both clinical information a nd MRIs. We calculated the interrater agreement for all two-way combin ations of clinicians with kappa statistics, which ranged from 0.46 (mo derate agreement) to 0.72 (substantial agreement). The moderate reliab ility observed in this study may be attributable to patient-, clinicia n-, or criteria-centered sources of variance.