Background

To assess the validity of a recently developed Korean version of the 7-minute screen (7MSK) consisting of 4 brief tests such as Benton temporal orientation, enhanced cured recall, clock drawing and category fluency to distinguish between patients with probable or possible Alzheimer's disease (AD), vascular dementia (VD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy control subjects.

Methods
From March 2001 to February 2002, the 7MSK and K-MMSE was administered to the 105 patients, who were diagnosed as having probable or possible AD, vascular dementia or MCI with successive referrals to two memory disorder & dementia clinics in Seoul, and to 311 healthy control subjects who were not excluded for normal elderly by health screen criteria. We determined inter-group comparison between patients with dementia and the controls on the 4 individual tests and the probability of dementia for patients with AD, VD and MCI.

Results
Mean scores for the patients with AD, VD and MCI and the control subjects on all 4 individual tests were significantly different (for each, P＜0.001). When the 4 tests were combined in a logistic regression after adjusting for age and education level, the battery had a sensitivity of 89% and a specificity of 90% with an optimal cut-off point of the predicted probability of 0.15. The 7MSK was equally sensitive in patients with mild AD or VD.

Conclusion
The 7MSK has a high validity for diagnosis of AD, VD or MCI. It may be a useful tool for early dementia screening.