Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
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To study how well the scoring on each item of the MMSE relates to the sum-score when the purpose is to identify persons with cognitive impairment, and to identify an equally effective subset of MMSE items for predicting cognitive impairment. ⋯ Six of the 20 MMSE variables perform poorly regarding sensitivity and misclassifications versus the sumscore at cut-point 23/24. Two additional items did not contribute to the prediction of a low/high sumscore. The remaining 12 MMSE items can all be scored binomially and produce a sumscore which is equally as effective as the sumscore of the full MMSE when the purpose is to identify elderly patients with cognitive impairment.