Construct validity of the Kendrick Battery with institutionalized aged

Development of an "early" detection battery for dementia of the Alzheimer type

1. To develop a diagnostic battery sensitive to and specific for the early detection of Alzheimer disease (AD) dementia, the authors reviewed over 400 journal articles dealing with the diagnosis of A.D. or senile dementia and cognitive assessment in organic brain dysfunction and closed head injury. 2. We culled those studies that met our criteria for solid, reliable and statistically significant results and recommend the testing paradigms that most often produced good discrimination of mild AD dementia from normal senescence. 3. These include tests of language, verbal and non-verbal memory, perception, praxis, attention and reasoning. 4. The battery we assembled takes less than 1 hour to administer, requires no special equipment, and was designed as an early screen for use by psychologists, psychiatrists and other trained health care professionals; it is not intended for repeated administration, as in pharmacological or longitudinal studies.

The Kendrick Battery: sensitivity to survival effects

In an effort to establish the sensitivity of the Kendrick Battery (KB) to mortality effects among institutionalized aged, the residualized pre-death KB scores (Digit Copying, Object Learning Subtests), as well as measures of affect (Zung Depression), and organicity (Luria Pathognomic Scale, Orientation Test) were compared in a sample of fifty-three elderly persons (M age = 82.7, SD = 7.76). Forty-two were female, eleven were male. Twenty-two of these individuals had subsequently died during an eighteen-month period following assessment. Six years after testing, thirty-six of these individuals had died. Step-wise discriminant analyses at each occasion yielded functions defined by the KB subtests, measures of organicity and depression, age of institutionalization, sex, and length of institutionalization that differentiated survivors and nonsurvivors. These data suggested that the Kendrick Battery subtests, measures of depression and organicity, in combination with length of institutionalization and age of admittance predict death among the elderly, for the most part, replicating previous research.