Manchester and Oxford Universities Scale for the Psychopathological Assessment of Dementia (MOUSEPAD)

Abstract

BACKGROUND There is increasing awareness of the importance of psychopathological and behavioural changes in dementia and a need for an instrument to measure these features which achieves an appropriate compromise between brevity and breadth. We describe a newly developed 59-item instrument: the MOUSEPAD. METHOD Reliability, sensitivity and validity were examined with 30 carers, each of whom was interviewed four times over six weeks. RESULTS For different symptom groups, kappa ranged from 0.43 to 0.93 for test-retest reliability, from 0.56 to 1.0 for inter-rater reliability, and from 0.43 to 0.67 for the validation study. CONCLUSIONS The scale may be useful as an outcome measure in drug trials, for correlating psychopathological and behavioural changes with post-mortem findings, and in epidemiological surveys.