Assessment of mood states in psychiatrically disturbed patients with dementia

Labile affect is a common characteristic of elderly psychiatry patients, especially among patients in the early stages of primary progressive dementia. The authors sought to develop a method of assessing the full range of positive and negative moods in psychiatric patients with early dementia and healthy elderly subjects. They modified the Derogatis Affects Balance Scale (DABS) to ease its administration in cognitively compromised patients and presented it to 51 geropsychiatry inpatients with dementia of either Alzheimer's or vascular etiology. The modified DABS was found to discriminate depressed and nondepressed dementia patients and have acceptable test-retest reliability coefficients, despite extensive variation in scores. Analyses of construct and criterion-related validity were also consistent with previous DABS normative studies.