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Biomedical subjects

F Huppert

Publications and source records attributed to F Huppert.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Cognitive decline in an elderly population--a two wave study of change.

A sample of 1111 survivors from a population aged 75 years and over completed the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) twice, separated by 28 months on average. There was a mean decline of 1.3 points in MMSE score. With increasing age, mean drop in score also increased. The proportion at each age identified as newly cognitively impaired according to any standard cut-point on MMSE rose markedly. Mean decline was greater in women than men even after adjustment for age. Cognitive change on the MMSE was approximately unimodally and normally distributed. This distribution was a marked contrast to the distribution of MMSE scores themselves, which was skewed due to truncation of scores at the maximum. The decline was not due to the inclusion of individuals with physical impairment. These findings indicate that cognitive decline, like dementia, becomes increasingly common with advancing age, and suggest that dementia may be regarded as one extreme of the continuum of cognitive decline.

Aged

Normality, deviance and minor psychiatric morbidity in the community. A population-based approach to General Health Questionnaire data in the Health and Lifestyle Survey.

This paper investigates factors affecting the distribution of psychiatric morbidity in the community. It identifies a close relationship between mean Chronic General Health Questionnaire (CGHQ) scores in subdivisions of a large random sample of the community (the Health and Lifestyle Survey, N = 6317) and the prevalence in these groups of abnormal, above-threshold CGHQ scores. The frequency distributions of CGHQ scores in these different populations move up and down as a whole: like other physiological and behavioural attributes, these mental health outcomes in individuals are associated with characteristics of the populations in which they arise. Populations thus carry a collective responsibility for their own mental health and well-being. This implies that explanations for the differing prevalence rates of psychiatric morbidity must be sought in the characteristics of their parent populations; and control measures are unlikely to succeed if they do not involve population-wide changes.

Adolescent

The Cambridge Project for Later Life: design and preliminary results.

The Cambridge Project for Later Life is the follow-up at 2.4 years of the Hughes Hall Project for Later Life, a prevalence study of dementia in Cambridge city in which 40% of the population aged 75 and over were screened for dementia. In the follow-up, 1,173 people were screened a second time, and using Mini-Mental Scale Examination scores were selected for a more intensive interview with CAMDEX. This was followed by detailed neuropsychological testing and magnetic resonance imaging in a smaller proportion of individuals.

Aged