Effective screening for Alzheimer's disease among older African Americans

Relatively little data exist concerning the utility of brief cognitive meas ures to detect dementia among African Americans. The current study evaluate d the clinical utility of the Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) and the Fuld O bject Memory Evaluation (FOME) in detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) among both African American and European American older adults. One hundred and f orty geriatric patients from a large urban academic medical center were exa mined. Overall, the FOME appeared to be more effective in detecting AT) tha n was the MMSE (93% sensitivity vs. 75% sensitivity, respectively), althoug h both measures suffered from relatively low specificity (63.5) in the full sample. The FOME demonstrated exceptional clinical utility among African A merican patients (sensitivity 98.3%; specificity = 64.5; positive predictiv e power 83.8%; negative predictive power 95.2%). The results of this study support the use of the FOME among older African Americans to detect dementi a.