GPs Missing Early Dementia, UK Study Shows

New research from the University of Leicester demonstrates that GPs are struggling to correctly identify people in the early stages of dementia resulting in both missed cases (false negatives) and misidentifications (false positives).

Researchers from the University of Leicester and the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health in London together with the Department of General Practice, Dusseldorf, Germany examined 30 previous studies involving 15,277 people seen in primary care for cognitive disorders, including 7109 assessed for dementia.

Although GPs managed to identify eight out of ten people with moderate to severe dementia, most patients with early dementia were not recognised. Only 45% of people with early dementia and mild cognitive impairment were identified. Mild cognitive impairment is a condition that may precede dementia in some people.

Across the whole spectrum, GPs identified 3 out of 5 of people attending for broadly defined memory problems.

Dr Alex Mitchell, a consultant psychiatrist with the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and a researcher at the University, said: "This study highlights for the first time that GPs trying to identify dementia actually make more false positive errors, with misidentifications outnumbering missed cases at least two to one."

He goes on to say, “Patients with mild dementia may not volunteer troubling memory problems and GPs are often unsure about the value of screening tests. Given the problem of false positives and false negatives we found that the application of a simple cognitive screening test after a clinical diagnosis would help GPs to achieve about 90% accuracy."

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