Mini-mental State Examination performance in mild cognitive impairment subtypes

Background: Diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and its subtypes requires a detailed diagnostic assessment and so may be missed at routine primary-care appointments, since the ordinary dementia screening tests lack sensitivity owing to ceiling effects, especially in highly educated subjects. Methods: The study was undertaken using a cross-sectional assessment of 112 elderly subjects (mean age 67.96 +/- 5.77 years, and mean education level of 12.8 +/- 5.7 years) with a semi-structured interview and a neuropsychological battery. Results: MCI patients did not differ from controls on total MMSE scores (p = 0.212). Nevertheless, MCI patients showed worse performance than controls on the verbal memory task (p = 0.012), and drawing a pentagon (p = 0.03). Amnestic MCI patients performed worse only on the three-word recall task (p = 0. 0 13); non-amnestic MCI patients performed worse on the three-stage command task (p = 0.00 1); and multiple-domain MCI patients performed worse on the drawing a pentagon task (p = 0.00 1) and had a trend toward performing poorly on the 'three word recall' task (p = 0.06). Conclusion: The analysis of MMSE subtest scores, in addition to MMSE total scores, may increase the sensitivity of the MMSE test in screening for MCI and its subtypes.