The one-minute mental status examination

The mental status examination is among the most time consuming aspects of neurologic evaluation. Comprehensive evaluations require assessment of attention, memory, language, visuospatial skills, executive function, and emotional and neuropsychiatric symptoms. There is increasing use of short, standardized mental status questionnaires such as the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE)1 to provide brief, objective measures of mental status changes. The MMSE has proven to be a very resilient instrument but it lacks measures of executive function and, when applied to individuals with dementia, is insensitive to the earliest changes, particularly in high-functioning individuals. What brief cognitive test can provide useful information regarding the presence and possible etiology of dementia? Duff Canning et al., in this issue of Neurology , offer an interesting answer to this question.2 They have performed comprehensive evaluations …