The Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) is used to assess neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia patients. To reduce clinicians' time taken to administer the NPI, the authors studied a caregiver-administered NPI (CGA-NPI), in which caregivers completed the written form of the NPI worksheet. After a brief presupervision session, the caregivers of 61 dementia patients completed the CGA-NPI by reading through the worksheet. This was followed by a postsupervision session to check if the caregivers had completed the form appropriately. The correlation between the prevalence rates of each neuropsychiatric symptom obtained by the CGA-NPI and those obtained by the NPI was fair to good (kappa = 0.57-0.90) in all domains. All frequency, severity, and caregivers' distress scores of the CGA-NPI correlated significantly with those of the NPI (r> 0.6, P<.001). Total CGA-NPI scores also correlated highly with total NPI scores (r= 0.86, P<.001). These results suggest that the CGA-NPI can substitute for the NPI, saving administration time.

Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale and Global Deterioration Scale (GDS) are commonly used to measure the severity of dementia. However, no specific rules are available to convert the scores of CDR into those of GDS and vice versa. Using a semi-structured interview, two examiners independently rated CDR and GDS in 78 patients with dementia and 34 controls. Regression analysis showed a curvilinear relationship between CDR and GDS. This curve may provide a rule to interchange the scores of GDS and CDR (or Sum of Boxes of CDR).

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The Syndrom Kurztest SKT is a brief neuropsychological test battery that consists of nine subtests and defines two independent factors of memory and attention deficit. The aim of this study was to validate the Korean version of the SKT. The reliability of each subtest among three parallel Forms (A, B and C) of the Korean version was high (r = 0.46-0.95). The SKT had good concurrent validity with the Mini-Mental State Examination (r = -0.83, p < 0.001). Factor analysis confirmed the presence of two primary factors, memory and attention. The overall similarities of the factor structures for the Korean data and those for the data from Germany and the USA provide evidence of the transcultural stability of the SKT.

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