A research group led by Nakakita Satoshi, a visiting researcher at the Community Rehabilitation Laboratory at Kio University Graduate School, examined all items on the "Basic Checklist," which is used to identify elderly people at high risk of requiring nursing care due to dementia, and found that five items, including items other than cognitive function items, are useful for predicting the onset of dementia within a one-year period.
Local governments use the basic checklist created by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to identify elderly people at high risk of needing nursing care due to dementia. Although it has been reported that the status of cognitive function items is useful for predicting the onset of dementia, it is possible that high-risk individuals are not being sufficiently identified using only cognitive function items.
The research group therefore followed up 65 elderly people aged 80 to 6,476 who were not certified as requiring nursing care for one year and examined all 1 items on the basic checklist related to the new onset of dementia (level of independence in daily living of Ⅱa or higher).
As a result, 1 people (40%) developed dementia over the course of one year, and five items from the Basic Checklist - "Shopping" (shopping for daily necessities), "Consultation" (listening to advice from family and friends), "Climbing the stairs" (being able to climb stairs without holding onto handrails or walls), "Forgetfulness" (always asking the same thing), and "Temporal orientation" (sometimes not knowing what date it is) - were associated with the onset of new dementia, and the combined score of the five items was shown to have better predictive accuracy than the cognitive function items and total score from the Basic Checklist.
The research group believes that the total score of the five items presented this time will be easy to use in general clinical practice for community comprehensive support centers involved in nursing care prevention, specialists such as public health nurses, and nursing care facilities, and will be useful in identifying high-risk individuals and for preventive intervention against dementia. In the future, they plan to verify whether this screening model is also useful for predicting the onset of dementia in the long term.
