Mayo's Older African American Normative Studies: Norms for the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale

ABSTRACT

Normative data are presented for older African Americans on the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (DRS). These data were collected as part of Mayo's Older African Americans Normative Studies (MOAANS) in an effort to develop age-appropriate norms for African Americans elders on commonly used measures in neuropsycholgical assessment. In this study, the DRS was administered to 307 MOAANS participants ranging in age from 56 to 94 years. Age-corrected subtest and total scores were derived based on percentile ranks from actual frequency distributions across seven age ranges. Also presented is a regression-based computational formula that may be applied to the age-corrected DRS total score to further correct for years of education. These norms should help improve interpration of DRS performance in African Americans and allow for greater diagnostic accuracy in patients with early cognitive decline.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was supported by Mayo's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (NIA P50 AG16574). The authors wish to sincerely thank the study participants, the staff of the Mary Singleton Senior Citizens Center, Bethel Baptist Church, and the many churches within the African American community of Jacksonville, Florida, for their strong support of our research efforts. We also gratefully acknowledge the staffs of Mayo's ADRC and Clinical Neuropsychology Service for their assistance in test administration, scoring, and data management. We are especially grateful to LaShaune Lawson, Shelia O'Rourke, and Sylvia Stewart, who served as study coordinators for the MOAANS project.

Notes

^a Age-and-education-corrected scaled scores, also published in the DRS-2 professional manual (Jurica, et al., 2001).

^b Bank, et al. (2000) norms are stratified by two education levels (< 12, ≥ 12), thereby resulting in identical normative estimates for 5 & 8 years of education, and for 12 & 16 years of education.

^c Marcopulos & McLain (2003) norms are provided only up to 10 years of education and therefore are not available for comparison at 12 and 16 years of education.

^d Scaled scores for Bank, et al. (2000) and Marcopulos & McLain (2003) normative estimates were derived from percentile scores based on z-score conversions of  Mean and SD data.

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