A Normative Study of the Mini-Mental State Examination for Dementia Screening (MMSE-DS) and Its Short form(SMMSE-DS) in the Korean Elderly

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to present the normative information of the Mini-Mental State Examination-Dementia Screening (MMSE-DS) and its short form (SMMSE-DS) in the Korean elderly. METHODS: The MMSE-DS was administered in a standardized manner to 1,008 healthy volunteers aged 60 years or over recruited from participants in the Korean Longitudinal Study on Health and Aging or from volunteers in the National Dementia Screening and Registry Program. The SMMSE-DS was consisted of 13 items from the MMSE-DS based on the diagnostic accuracy of individual items for dementia. RESULTS: Age and educational level were found to have significant effect on the SMMSE-DS score, but sex was not. Based on this result, overlapping age normative table (60 to 74, 70 to 84, and 75 to 90 years of age) with 4 educational strata (0 to 3 years, 4 to 6 years, 7 to 12 years and 13 years and more) was developed for the SMMSE-DS. For resulting 12 normative units, 5 percentile, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, mean, standard deviation and -1.5standard deviation were calculated. CONCLUSION: The normative data from this study can be widely used as reference values to objectively interpret the MMSE-DS and SMMSE-DS scores of the Korean elderly.