Life expectancy is increasing and increasing age is a risk factor for suffering from a neurodegenerative disease. Therefore, cases of dementia and/or cognitive problems will continue to increase in the coming years.
It is therefore important to have tools that allow us to detect neurocognitive problems quickly and effectively. The earlier the detection, the sooner you can start using intervention strategies that, while it is true that they do not stop the progress of the disease, they can help slow it down.
To detect neurocognitive problems quickly and easily, we have various instruments, the so-called screening tests, which are a first step in the evaluation of cognitive deterioration and dementia. In this Psychology-Online article, we talk about one of these screening tests. We explain What is it, what is it for and how is the Pfeiffer Questionnaire interpreted?.
What is the Pfeiffer scale?
The Pfeiffer questionnaire or SPMSQ (Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire) is a screening questionnaire used to detect cognitive impairment. Martínez de la Iglesia, J. et al. (2001) carried out the translation and adaptation of the Spanish version.
It is a questionnaire that offers numerous advantages:
- Its application is simple, it does not present any difficulty.
- It is a short questionnaire that consists of 10 items. The test can be completed in just a few minutes.
- No additional material is necessary.
- It can be administered to people with visual difficulties, since the questions will be read by the professional.
- It can also be applied to people who have psychomotor problems since it is a test that requires only verbal responses from the patient.
- It does not require a high cultural level on the part of the patient. In this regard, the score obtained can even be corrected depending on the level of education.
What is the Pfeiffer questionnaire for?
The Pfeiffer test is used to detect cognitive impairment in people over 65 years of age. What does the Pfeiffer questionnaire measure? Following the review by Villarejo and Puertas (2011), what the Pfeiffer Questionnaire evaluates is:
- Orientation.
- Information.
- Memory.
- Simple calculation.
As a screening test, this will alert us to the possible presence of cognitive impairment. If positive, we must continue studying if the test results indicate this.
Pfeiffer scale questions
The Pfeiffer questionnaire consists of 10 questions:
- The first question refers to the date of the day that the test is passed. What is expected for this item is that the patient indicates the complete date, that is, the day, month and year.
- Secondly, and continuing with the evaluation of temporal orientation, the patient is asked about the weekday.
- The third question refers to spatial orientation. In this question the patient is asked to indicate where is it located andn at the time of the test. You don’t need to detail the location, just identify where it is located.
- The fourth item asks the patient to indicate their phone number. It is possible that older people do not have or have had a telephone and that is why there is the possibility of asking them, instead of their telephone number, their address complete.
- The fifth question consists of asking the patient about his age.
- Sixthly, the question will be asked place of birth.
- The seventh and eighth questions require the patient to indicate the name of the actual president and the past president respectively.
- Question number nine refers to the surnames of the patient’s mother.
- Finally, in question number ten of the Pfeiffer test, the patient is asked to subtract three by three from the number 20 and until reaching 0.
How the Pfeiffer scale is evaluated
Although it is a simple test and the questions do not entail any difficulty, the truth is that during the application process the professional can observe relevant details for the assessment of the case. However, it is an objective test that has guidelines for its correction that allow a score to be obtained.
Once the test has been administered, the number of errors the patient has made is counted and they are classified based on them.
Pfeiffer questionnaire evaluation criteria
- Normal: If the patient makes one or two errors, the patient is considered to have no deterioration.
- slight deterioration: the number of errors is three or four.
- Moderate impairment: the patient has made between five and seven errors.
- Severe impairment: the patient has made more than seven errors.
Therefore, the cut-off points are the 3 failures, the 5 and the 7.
The Pfeiffer Questionnaire takes into account the educational level of the patients, which is undoubtedly an added value for this questionnaire. In this sense, one point will be added to each category (that is, we will consider deterioration from four points) when the patient’s educational level is low; On the other hand, one point will be subtracted from each category when the educational level is high (that is, it will be considered deterioration when the patient makes two errors).
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Pfeiffer scale: what it is, what it is for and how it is interpretedwe recommend that you enter our category.
References
- Martínez de la Iglesia, J., Dueñas Herrero, R., Onís Vilches, MC, Aguado Taberné, C., Albert Colomer, C. and Luque Luque, R. (2001). Adaptation and validation into Spanish of the Pfeiffer questionnaire (SPMSQ) to detect the existence of cognitive impairment in people over 65 years of age. Clinical Medicine, 117 (4), 129-134.
- Villarejo and Puertas (2011). Usefulness of brief tests in dementia screening. Neurology, 26 (7), 425-433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nrl.2010.12.002