The accuracy of family physicians dementia diagnoses at different stages of dementia: a systematic review
Posted on Thu, Jun 02, 2011
International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 06/02/2011 Evidence Based Medicine
Van Den Dungen P et al. - Many individuals with dementia are not recognised or not diagnosed as such; particularly mild dementia is under-diagnosed. Collaboration within primary care and education focussing both on knowledge and attitude are recommended to improve the accuracy of family physicians' dementia diagnosis.
Methods
- Pubmed, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Library were searched for articles comparing family physicians' ‘dementia’ and ‘cognitive impairment’ diagnoses in the primary care setting to reference standard dementia diagnoses.
Results
- Data from six cross-sectional studies of moderate to reasonable methodological quality were extracted for the analysis.
- One study considered the accuracy of family physicians' recollected diagnoses, and three studies focussed on documented diagnoses.
- In these four studies, the sensitivity of family physicians' combined diagnostic categories of ‘cognitive impairment’ together with ‘dementia’ was 0.48–0.67 for mild dementia and 0.76–0.85 for moderate to severe dementia....read more
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