Mini Mental State Examination

To investigate the effects of an intensive, inpatient rehabilitation programme on individuals affected by Huntington's disease. A pilot study. Within-subjects design. Inpatient rehabilitation home of the Italian welfare system. Forty patients, early and middle stage of the disease, were recruited to an intensive, inpatient rehabilitation protocol. The treatment programme included respiratory exercises and speech therapy, physical and occupational therapy and cognitive rehabilitation exercises. The programme involved three-week admission periods of intensive treatment that could be repeated three times a year. A standard clinical assessment was performed at the beginning of each admission using the Zung Depression Scale, Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Barthel Index, Tinetti Scale and Physical Performance Test (PPT). Tinetti and PPT were also used at the end of each admission to assess the outcomes in terms of motor and functional performance. Each three-week period of trea...

OBJECTIVE. To design a brief cognitive screener with acceptable sensitivity and speci- ficity for identifying subjects with cognitive impairment DESIGN. Cohort one is assembled from a community-based survey coupled with a second-stage diagnostic evaluation using for- mal diagnostic criteria for dementia. Cohort two is assembled from referrals to a specialty clinic for dementing disorders that completed the same diagnostic evaluation.

MMSE (Folstien, 1975) was translated, adapted and used in following study.  *Tiwari, S.C., Tripathi, R.K., and Kumar, A.  Applicability of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Hindi Mental State Examination (HMSE) to the urban elderly in India: a pilot study.  International Psychogeratrics, 21,1: 123-128, 2009 doi:10.1017/S1041610208007916

Background: Executive functioning (EF) coordinates cognitive functioning (CF). According to some studies, EF declines with age. CF is relatively stable until 50-60 years of age, but it declines after that. Interaction between executive impairment (EI) and cognitive impairment (CI) has been confirmed. It is not known which specific cognitive functions are affected by EI.
Objective: We have carried out a transversal study to determine the severity of EF and CF; prevalence of EI and CI, relationship between EF and CF, relationship between EF, CF, sociodemographic and emotional variables, the impact of EF on CF, by controlling the variables which have shown correlations between EF and CF.
Methodology: We use a convenience sample of 483 old persons, being between 60 and 100 years of age, the sample is very aged (53.7% above 81 years-old), female (76.6%), single (80.3%) and non-qualified job (91.3%). Through Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), the sample was divided in two subgroups: elderly people with CI (n = 347) and elderly people without CI (n = 136). EF was assessed with Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB); CF was assessed with MMSE and its subscales (memory, praxis, language, orientation, and attention functions) and with Rey Complex Figure Test (FCR-O) and the emotional ones with the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) and the Geriatric Anxiety Inventory (GAI).
Results: The elderly inquired present significantly lower averages in EF and CF measured by the MMSE and by the FCR-O. Prevalence of the EI was high (74.6%), as was the CI (71.8%), the immediate (75.9%) and the delayed mnesic impairment (61.0%). EF correlates significantly with CF, with FCR-O copy and immediate memory, with depressive symptomatology, with education, and with profession. Logistic regression analysis, after controlling the role of emotional and sociodemographic variables, has shown that the EI increases 0,86 times the chance of suffering from CI measured by MMSE and 0.77 times by the FCR-O copy. The regression model wasn’t valid for immediate and delayed memory.
Conclusion: EF has an impact on elderly people’s CF under social response. This result sustains the importance of assessing EF to prevent CI through cognitive rehabilitation programs.

It is well known that the adult nervous system preserves a plasti- city potential that is able to guarantee partial recovery after an injury. It has also already been demonstrated that mirror-neurons play a key role in the activity of human neural circuits, i.e. in the observation-imitation-learning process. A new therapeutic rehabilita- tion treatment called mirror therapy exploits the mirror-neurons system activation, trying to lead the nervous system plasticity. In the present study, mirror therapy combined with conventional therapy has been compared with conventional therapy alone in the motor recovery of the upper limbs. A total of 14 patients with brain injuries in a sub-acute or chronic phase participated in the trial, divi- ded into two equal groups. Before and after the rehabilitation pro- gram, each patient underwent examination and complete physiatric evaluation (Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Functional Inde- pendence Measure (FIM), Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA), Mo...

The distribution of change scores of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) was assessed in healthy aged subjects after an interval of 1 year. As part of the Amsterdam Study of the Elderly, which is a community survey on ageing and cognitive decline (N = 4051; age range 65–84), a subsample of subjects (N = 247) was studied twice. Participants with dementia, other psychiatric disorders or physical disease which might interfere with cognitive testing were excluded. Test-retest reliability was 0.55 in this group. The distribution of change scores ranged from −9 to +5. From this result the following clinical rule-of-thumb was derived. In an individual patient, and in the absence of other indications of a dementing process, a deterioration in MMSE score must be greater than five points after 1 year to be suspect for a genuine cognitive decline.