Insight in Alzheimer's patients: Results of a longitudinal study using three assessment methods

Abstract

Three direct measures of dementia insight were administered to 20 participants in a longitudinal Alzheimer's disease (AD) rehabilitation research project 1 and to subsets of these participants that completed one (N = 19), two (N = 12), and three (N = 6) years of program participation. The measures were: (1) responses to a discourse prompt question about AD (ADPQ); (2) endorsements of seven items on the Geriatric Depression Scale 2 (GDS) about the effects of dementia (separate analyses were done for two of the seven items that related specifically to memory and thinking); and (3) a sentence-completion exercise. Responses to measures 1 and 2 and the subset of 2 were quantified, tracked over time, and subjected to correlational analyses with age, Mini-Mental State Exam 3 (MMSE) score, and depression, as measured by total GDS score, and with each other.