Background: The Salzburg Dementia Test Prediction (SDTP), developed using artificial intelligence and based on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), was recently introduced as a brief cognitive screening tool for cognitive impairment.
Objective: In the current study, we investigated whether the STDP can be used as a valid bed-side cognitive screening tool for dementia patients, in an English-speaking, medical inpatient setting.
Methods: 216 medically ill older patients who had completed the MMSE (from which the SDTP scores can be calculated), with a subsample 58 patients who had also completed the ACE-R/ACE-III scales. Diagnosis of one of four dementia types (n = 127) and socio-demographic information were also collected. MMSE, SDTP, ACE-R/ACE-III, and dementia diagnosis were used to examine the construct validity of the SDTP through assessments of the structural, concurrent, and convergent validity.
Results: The SDTP shows structural validity through demonstrating uni-dimensionality. Construct validity was demonstrated by sufficient correlation sizes with MMSE scores against a benchmark correlation size for most of the subsample, except vascular dementia. Convergent validity was demonstrated for the STDP with equivalent correlations sizes with ACE-R/ACE-III as the MMSE across all samples, though for vascular dementia the magnitude of this correlation was not as strong.
Conclusions: Our findings support using STDP as a brief assessment tool among patients who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Lewy body disease, and mixed dementia; however, there is some statistical variability to overall MMSE scores and correlations with the ACE-R/ACE-III among patients diagnosed with vascular dementia.
Keywords: Cognitive test; Mini-Mental State Examination; Salzburg Dementia Test Prediction; dementia; medically ill; older people.