Using the neurobehavioral cognitive status examination as a screening measure for older adults.

We evaluated the ability of the Neurobehavioral Cognitive Status Examination (NCSE) to accurately distinguish between healthy older adults and geriatric patients suffering from dementia. Although the NCSE correctly identified all dementia patients, it produced an unacceptably high rate of false positives among the healthy elderly (70%). Despite the NCSE's lack of specificity when using the recommended classification criteria, significant group differences were found on several individual subscales and on the total number of subscales passed. These findings suggest the need to further evaluate the appropriateness of the geriatric norms for the NCSE and highlight some of the unique considerations involved in the assessment of older adults.

Confabulation in Alzheimer's disease.

Confabulation is present when memory is disturbed, but does it occur in Alzheimer's disease (AD) where memory abnormalities are often severe? In this study, confabulation was assessed prospectively in 26 AD patients and 15 normal elderly (NE) controls using a neuropsychological battery specifically designed to assess different types of memory errors. The results indicated that the AD group made significantly more verbal intrusions than the NE group. These findings provide evidence for the feasibility of eliciting confabulatory-type behavior during clinical assessment and support previous reports which have documented verbal intrusions as a common accompaniment of the memory impairment manifested by AD patients.