My 97 yo mum experienced a couple significant falls in April of this year. She was sent to rehab and diagnosed with moderate dementia (which surprised me - but if I think back, there may have been subtle signs). About a month later, she was reevaluated with the same score. She's been in rehab this whole time with daily PT and limited visitation from family due to Covid. I live on the other side of the country so depend on my family for whatever information they can gather and pass along to me as well as weekly calls to the facility with scant info. Yesterday, they reevaluated her and said her score jumped 3 points for the better. She is also improving quite a bit with her mobility. She was at first non weight bearing for the first couple months. Now she is walking 150 steps with help. So...I'm wondering if her overall well being is improving which can improve the cognitive state or...am I just hoping against hope?
That's great that she improved. And on the PT and mobility side, that's also great. The more active she can be, the better.
Any test that measures cognitive skills has a "confidence interval". So, on a standard intelligence test (with an average score of 100 and a standard deviation of 15--which means that a difference of 15 points is significant) you can generally be 95% confident that the " true" score lies in a range of +/- 7 points.
You need to ask the person who is doing the testing if 3 points on this instrument is statistically significant or if it is within the band of error.
This is from a paper on that subject:
"Conclusion: An individual's score would have to change by greater than or equal to 3 points on the MMSE and 4 points on the MoCA for the rater to be confident that the change was not due to measurement error. This has important implications for epidemiologists and clinicians in dementia screening and diagnosis."
It is such a confusing disease because there is so much fluctuation in symptoms from day to day, hour to hour and definitely incident to incident.
it’s a very very mild type dementia of the very seniors… mild slowly progressive not at all like the ones
people in their 70’s 80’s and younger ! I wouldn’t worry about someone with that advanced age and that style of dementia!!!
count your blessings !!!