Cross-national Inter-rater Reliability of Dementia Diagnosis.

The article examines the cross-national inter-rater reliability of dementia diagnosis. In field trials of DSM-III-R, psychiatrists achieved concordance rates for diagnosing dementia of 0.91, where 1.0 represents complete agreement. Recent findings suggest that dementia can be diagnosed with acceptable reliability in community surveys. Agreement is likely to be higher when teams train intensively and use instruments that require simple "yes-no" choices.