Rastreio do comprometimento cognitivo em indivíduos com 60 anos de idade ou mais: uma revisão sistemática

Abstract

Introduction: With the increasing aging of the population, there is an increase in the elderly people who have cognitive impairment and the possibility of progressing to dementia. Up to now, there is no consensus in primary care on the best strategy for cognitive impairment screening in the elderly. In view of this situation, a standardization, with simple but reasonably accurate instrumentation for a brief cognitive test, in environments of primary care, would be an important progress in order to enable health professionals identify those who require a more in-depth assessment of cognition and, consequently, make diagnosis viable and the treatment in the initial stages of the disease's evolutionary process, implying benefits for both patients and health systems. Objectives: To investigate the instruments used by health professionals in worldwide publications and to verify which are the most suitable instruments to cognitive impairment screening in individuals aged 60 years or older, in the Brazilian population. Method: Systematic literature search of primary studies using instruments to cognitive impairment screening in individuals aged 60 years or older, in the MEDLINE, EMBASE, COCRANE CENTRAL and LILACS databases, with the keywords of cognitive dysfunction, mass screening and elderly. Results: The identification of 983 articles, which had their titles and abstracts applied by two independent reviewers, who selected 49 articles for full text reading, based on the criteria used in this review. Finally, 16 articles were selected (1 from the USA, 2 from Spain, 1 from China, 1 from France, from Brazil, 1 from Honduras, 1 from Sri Lanka, 2 from South Korea, 1 from the United Kingdom , and 2 from Germany), adhering to cognitive impairment screening in the elderly, for subjects deeply analyzed, with their marked results and that were used in the discussions and conclusions of this work. Discussion and Conclusion: The Mini-Mental State Examination was the most cited instrument in the selected trials. The Pfeffer Functional Activities Questionnaire and the Verbal Fluency Test (semantic category) include characteristics, detailed in this work, which favor new studies for tests, as screening instruments for cognitive impairment in the elderly of the Brazilian population