Centre for Policy on Ageing



Cognitive impairment in medical inpatients — II: Do physicians miss cognitive impairment?
Author(s)	Daniel M J Harwood, Tony Hope, Robin Jacoby
Journal title	Age and Ageing, vol 26, no 1, January 1997
Pages	pp 37-40
Keywords	In-patients ; Medical wards ; Cognitive impairment ; Screening ; Evaluation.
Annotation	201 patients aged 65+ were assessed by by administration of standard cognitive screening tests and an interview with relatives. The researchers made Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IIIR) diagnoses of various causes of cognitive impairment and clinical diagnoses for those patients fulfilling DSM-IIIR criteria. Medical notes were scrutinised for any mention of cognitive impairment. 46% of the patients were found to be cognitively impaired by the researcher and had no record of cognitive impairment in the medical notes. However, 14 out of 15 of the patients with DSM-IIIR delirium and 22 out of the 26 patients with DSM-IIIR dementia were identified as cognitively impaired by the physicians. This suggests that the physicians were detecting the vast majority of patients with clinically significant cognitive impairment. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-970829207 A
Classmark	LF7: LD4: E4: 3V: 4C
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.