Interpreting subject and informant reports of function in screening for dementia

A related article showed that five widely used screens for dementia predicted criterion diagnosis well with extreme scores, but misclassified many persons when screen scores were intermediate (borderzone). In this article, based on representative samples of community elders from the North Manhattan Aging Project, information on the subject's functioning was added to intermediate dementia screen scores and found to increase specificity, with sensitivity held constant. Informant reports on the subject's functioning predicted criterion diagnosis somewhat better than did the subject's self‐report of functioning.