Age and education correction of Mini-Mental State Examination for English- and Spanish-speaking elderly

Abstract

Studies focusing specifically on Hispanics have also attributed poor performance on cognitive tests to low education. Bird et al. ^[6] and Escobar et al., ^[7] both studying non-elderly samples, found that education significantly influences MMS performance. Gurland et al., ^[14] in a large-scale study involving white, black, and Hispanic elderly subjects, found that conventional cutoff points for the MMS and other mental status tests resulted in increased false-positives for the minority groups, and especially for the Hispanic group. The authors suggested that the results reflected lower educational levels of the Hispanic persons tested in addition to sociocultural bias within the scales.