Grant: Operating Grant

Disability due to cognitive or mental impairment is an increasing concern for older Canadians. People notice changes in their mental abilities as they age and some worry they may develop dementia. Health care professionals would like to improve their ability to measure mental abilities and identify those patients who are most in need of interventions to slow the rate of cognitive decline. Sophisticated techniques such as brain imaging, genetic testing or neuropsychological assessment can help predict whether mental functioning will remain stable or decline. Unfortunately, these are too costly for regular use in most clinics. Fortunately, brief and inexpensive screening tests are already available to most clinics. These are simple pencil-and-paper tests of memory and other mental abilities that say whether or not a person has mental impairment. With this project we will test whether these screening tests can tell us much more than just if there is cognitive impairment or not. We believe that the way people respond to specific test questions can tell us a lot about an individual's strengths and weaknesses in mental abilities. This information will guide decisions about which methods can help a particular patient compensate for impairment. We will also test whether the response to specific questions can predict who can sustain mental functioning over the next few years, so that additional expensive tests are not necessary. Finally, we will develop a new test for measuring mental ability that takes less time to complete, even for people with significant cognitive impairment. This work is important because the results will have immediate practical applications for people working in geriatric health care, even where resources are limited.