Dementia: The Relative Utilities of the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale – Cognitive Subscale and the Cognitive Drug Research System

work showing that various CDR measures relate closely to activities of daily living. The sensitivity of the CDR system to anticholinesterases will be described in Alzheimer’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson’s dementia. Fi-nally, the CDR system has a large normative database which allows treatment effects in dementia to be put into an un-ambiguous clinical perspective. Copyright © 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel While the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale – Cognitive Subscale (ADAS-cog) is widely accepted as the gold standard in registration trials of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), there is no regulatory mandate for this. The strengths of the ADAS-cog are its history of use and ability to assess important aspects of cognition such as memory. However, these are overshadowed by its numerous weaknesses [1] , which include: the subjective nature of several of the assessments; the fact that it fails to assess several core deficits of AD including attention, information processing and speed of retrieval of infor-mation held in memory; the absence of formal parallel forms; the time taken to administer it; the specialist train-ing required for administrators; its relative insensitivity, and its failure in many recent trials to reliably identif