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MMSE Review Paper

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The validity and reliability of the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), a commonly used assessment to evaluate cognitive and emotional abilities as a result of organic brain disease, has been published in over 50 languages. These include Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Nigerian. However, one under-represented population, the culturally deaf, has been neglected for such an assessment. Because the MMSE has never been translated into American Sign Language, or ASL, there is a lack of validity and reliability for its use with the elderly Deaf population (Feldman, Dean, Morere, Morton, 2009). Important to note for this study is the distinguishing of the difference between “deaf” (denoting audiological deafness) and “Deaf” (the use of ASL as the primary …show more content…

As they often lack access to information, deaf individuals may have a limited ability to seek services further complicated by barriers to communication between practitioner and the individual. This is explained by the differences in neuropsychological diagnoses. Whereas a deaf individual’s presentation of symptoms is often ambiguous, a misdiagnosis can be reflective of a misunderstanding of a task because there may be difficulty comprehending task demands when the primary form of communication is ASL (Feldman et al., 2009). So, the intended purpose of this study was to investigate ways in which to make neuropsychological assessment, particularly the MMSE, more appropriate for the Deaf. The research question at hand was to evaluate the use of the MMSE with culturally deaf senior citizens to maximize their performance with minimal changes made to the structure of item instructions. The objective was to examine the performance of culturally Deaf elders on the MMSE and evaluate patterns of scores on test items. Simply, that the assessment of the MMSE on elderly deaf individuals will be more accurate once the necessary changes have been made to optimize its translation into ASL. Importantly, demographic information was utilized to assess variables that may be correlated to

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