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Clock Drawing in Alzheimer's Disease
Author(s) -
Sunderland Trey,
Hill James L.,
Mellow Alan M.,
Lawlor Brian A.,
Gundersheimer Joshua,
Newhouse Paul A.,
Grafman Jordan H.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
journal of the american geriatrics society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.992
H-Index - 232
eISSN - 1532-5415
pISSN - 0002-8614
DOI - 10.1111/j.1532-5415.1989.tb02233.x
Subject(s) - medicine , alzheimer's disease , dementia , neuropsychology , test (biology) , neuropsychological test , audiology , disease , psychiatry , cognition , paleontology , biology
We have tested a simple and reliable measure of visuospatial ability in Alzheimer patients — the Clock Drawing Test. To determine the usefulness of this measure, we asked 67 Alzheimer patients and 83 normal controls to draw the face of a clock reading the time of 2:45. Six independent observers blindly evaluated the results with ratings from 10 (best) to 1 (worst). The mean performance score of Alzheimer subjects was 4.9 ± 2.7 compared to 8.7 ± 1.1 for normal controls (P < .001). Inter‐rater reliability for the clocks drawn by Alzheimer patients was highly significant (r = 0.86; P < .001), and there was relatively little overlap between ratings for Alzheimer patients and normal controls. Furthermore, correlations were highly significant (P < .001) between the mean score of clock drawings and three independent global measures of dementia severity. Although the Clock Drawing Test is certainly not a definitive indicator of Alzheimer's disease, the test is easy to administer and provides a useful measure of dementia severity for both research and office settings where sophisticated neuropsychological testing is not available .