Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Jan;25(1):96-104.
doi: 10.1017/S104161021200141X. Epub 2012 Aug 20.

The Mini-Cog, Clock Drawing Test, and the Mini-Mental State Examination in a German memory clinic: specificity of separation dementia from depression

Monika Milian  1 , Anna-Maria Leiherr, Guido Straten, Stephan Müller, Thomas Leyhe, Gerhard W Eschweiler
Affiliations
Free article

The Mini-Cog, Clock Drawing Test, and the Mini-Mental State Examination in a German memory clinic: specificity of separation dementia from depression

Monika Milian et al. Int Psychogeriatr. 2013 Jan.
Free article

Abstract

Background: The aim of this study was to assess the specificities of the Mini-Cog, the Clock Drawing Test (CDT), and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) against depression and healthy controls in a German Memory Clinic. Furthermore, we analyzed the specificities of all three screening instruments in dependence of actual depression severity.

Methods: Data from 142 depressed elderly, 438 dementia patients, and 64 healthy controls were retrospectively analyzed. The CDT and an extraction of the three-item recall of the MMSE were used to constitute the Mini-Cog algorithm. Depression severity was rated by either the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) or the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) depending on the age of the patients.

Results: The Mini-Cog achieved a specificity of 79.6% against depressed elderly and 100.0% against healthy subjects (p < 0.001). Similarly, the specificities of the CDT (83.8%) and MMSE (92.3% at a cut-off ≤24 and 90.8% at ≤25, respectively) against healthy subjects were significantly higher than the specificities against depressed patients (each p < 0.05). Concerning the depressed patients, the MMSE demonstrated significant higher specificity than the Mini-Cog and the CDT, but also showed the lowest sensitivity for the detection of dementia. Surprisingly, the depression severity had no effect on the specificity of the Mini-Cog and the CDT, only the MMSE was susceptible for the depression severity.

Conclusion: Although the MMSE showed higher specificities, the weighting between the sensitivities and specificities in all tests prove again the Mini-Cog as a short, valid, and sensitive screening tool.

PubMed Disclaimer