Mini Mental Status Assessment

Common tests used in the Neurointensive care setting

Cognition is a broad term, which comprises of number of mental faculties which an individual acquire, process and store information, and how they use information to make decisions and solve problems. Each cognitive test mentioned below is described briefly in three aspects (figure 1).
Figure:1
Firstly, which cognitive functions the test target; secondly, the administration time (which has the utmost importance in neurocritical care settings); thirdly, the applicability of the test (age, education, and gender specific relevance).

Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE) (Ref)

The MMSE is an assessment tool that has worldwide use as it is quite economical on time and training required to

Disability rating scale (DRS)
The DRS is a popular measure which includes eight items and four categories. Patients can observe a maximum score of 29 (indicative of extreme vegetative state) and a minimum of 0 (indicative of no disability). The DRS could be self-administered or rated by interviewing the patient, relative or care giver. However, the scale is not very sensitive with high functioning patients with mild deficits (2, 14).

The Everyday Abilities Scale for India [EASI]
It is an 11 item ADL scale developed for the illiterate elderly population in the Ballabgarh rural area in North India which takes 5 minutes to administer. This study was conducted on people over 55 years of age and suggested an operational cut off point of 3, yielding a sensitivity of 62.5% and specificity of 89.7%. Besides this it has also been validated against MMSE which showed 81.3%, and 89.7% of sensitivity and specificity respectively. Thus, this tools is not just education & culture bias free but also holds good psychometric properties.

Barthel

It has easiest scoring where the lowest score interpret higher disability quotient.
The SF-12 as the name suggests is a shorter version of the SF-36. The SF-12 also assesses 8 domains but has fewer items in each domain. Although the shorter version is not as comprehensive as the SF-36, the SF-12 has been found to be a good tool. This is especially true if time is limited or if several other measures are also being used to assess the patient (2).

The World Health Organization quality of life scale (WHOQOL) and WHOQOL-BREF

The WHOQOL is a quality of life assessment tool which consists of 100 items. It was developed by the World Health Organization quality of life group with the aim of creating a quality of life measure that could be used across different cultures. The study was carried out in fifteen international field centers, simultaneously. The WHOQOL-BREF is a shortened version of the WHOQOL-100. It was developed by the World Health organization in 1996. It consists of 26 items, which measure 4 broad domains