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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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General practice-based intervention for suspecting and detecting dementia in France
— a cluster randomized controlled trial | | Author(s) | Virginie Rondeau, Hervé Allain, Serge Bakchine |
| Journal title | Dementia: the international journal of social research and practice, vol 7, no 4, November 2008 |
| Pages | pp 433-450 |
| Source | http://www.dem.sagepub.com |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Diagnosis ; Assessment procedures for mental patients ; General practice ; In-service training ; Clinical surveys ; France. |
| Annotation | The study evaluated the impact of general practice based intervention on 3012 patients in France aged 75+ with spontaneous memory complaints. The objective was to identify evocative signs of Alzheimer's disease (AD) through a cluster randomised controlled trial. The study involved 681 general practitioners (GPs) randomly selected and assigned to an intervention (n=352) or a control group (n=329), and 214 specialists. The intervention group participated in training sessions relating to dementia diagnosis and the use of brief neuropsychological tests suited to general practice. The control group dispensed usual GP care. The primary outcome was suspicion of dementia by GPs. The secondary outcome was accurate detection of dementia by GPs (mean follow-up duration 10.8 years, similar in both groups). Suspicion of dementia was two times higher for GPs in the intervention group. Probability of suspected dementia increased with patient age and decreased with educational level. However, the positive predictive value was not significantly different between the two groups (60.9% vs 64.9%). GPs from the intervention group also had a higher probability of correctly detecting demented patients (intervention did not increase the number of diagnosed cases of dementia, but increased the number of suspected cases that were later confirmed by specialists). The study showed that information on dementia and application of simple psychometric tests could improve the precision of a GP's diagnosis without changing the efficacy of detection of dementia. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-090126202 A |
| Classmark | EA: LK7: DA:4C: L5: QWD: 3G: 765 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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