Showing Related Articles
The accuracy of family physicians dementia diagnoses at different stages of dementia: a systematic review
International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 06/02/2011
Evidence Based Medicine
Van Den Dungen P et al. – Many individuals with dementia are not recognised or not diagnosed as such; particularly mild dementia is under–diagnosed. Collaboration within primary care and education focussing both on knowledge and attitude are recommended to improve the accuracy of family physicians' dementia diagnosis.
Methods- Pubmed, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Library were searched for articles comparing family physicians' ‘dementia’ and ‘cognitive impairment’ diagnoses in the primary care setting to reference standard dementia diagnoses.
- Data from six cross–sectional studies of moderate to reasonable methodological quality were extracted for the analysis.
- One study considered the accuracy of family physicians' recollected diagnoses, and three studies focussed on documented diagnoses.
- In these four studies, the sensitivity of family physicians' combined diagnostic categories of ‘cognitive impairment’ together with ‘dementia’ was 0.48–0.67 for mild dementia and 0.76–0.85 for moderate to severe dementia.
- The sensitivity of their diagnostic category ‘dementia’ alone was 0.14–0.33 for mild and 0.28–0.61 for moderate to severe dementia.
- Specificity was excellent for all severity stages in both comparisons.
