Should the Mini-Mental State Examination be retired?

Cognitive tests for the detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the prodromal stage of dementia: Meta‐analysis of diagnostic accuracy studies

“…Despite having different inclusion criteria, our results largely concur with those of the meta-analysis by Tsoi and colleagues. 32 45 especially since the MoCA is both more sensitive to impairment in a variety of clinical settings 46,47 (including MCI, as demonstrated in the present meta-analysis) and available free of copyright in 35 languages. This is to be expected, given that the MoCA was developed with the specific intention of being sensitive for MCI.…”

Legal medicine: assessing mental capacity and writing medical reports for deputy applications

“…Newer instruments with greater diagnostic accuracy for detecting cognitive impairment and dementia are now available. (14) Some adjustments to the MMSE English version for use in Singapore are necessary: (a) Since Singapore has no distinct season changes -spring, summer, autumn or winter -there is a need to modify Question 5 of the standard MMSE ('What is this season? ').…”

“…This is a reasonable change, which we support. (d) For sentence repetition, Feng et al (14) changed 'no ifs, ands or buts', in Q24 of the English version, to '44 stone lions', which is a tongue twister when spoken in Mandarin. Ng et al (16) used this in their research, as well as 'marah (angry, furious), merah (red), and murah (cheap)' for the Malay version.…”

Interpreting Mini-Mental State Examination Performance in Highly Proficient Bilingual Spanish–English and Asian Indian–English Speakers: Demographic Adjustments, Item Analyses, and Supplemental Measures

“…Psychometric studies generally report good reliability and validity in identifying moderate-severe cognitive impairment (Tombaugh & McIntyre, 1992) but weaker sensitivity/specificity in identifying mild cognitive impairment (Carnero-Pardo, 2014;Mitchell, 2009;Tombaugh & McIntyre, 1992). As with many cognitive tests, performance on the MMSE is known to be affected by demographic variables, particularly education, age, ethnicity, and language of test administration (Bravo & Hébert, 1997;Crum, Anthony, Bassett, & Folstein, 1993;Matallana & Reyes-Ortiz, 2011;Ramirez, Teresi, Holmes, Gurland, & Lantigua, 2006;Tombaugh & McIntyre, 1992).…”

“…In contrast, individuals from minority groups tend to have greater difficulty on items more closely tied to education, language, and other sociocultural differences. Another approach to compensate for assessment bias in minority groups has been to supplement or replace the MMSE with measures that are less influenced by verbal ability/education (Arevalo-Rodriguez et al, 2015;Carnero-Pardo, 2014;Crowe, Allman, Triebel, Sawyer, & Martin, 2010;Matallana & Reyes-Ortiz, 2011;Mitchell, 2009).…”