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Published
by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. CLICK FOR NEWSPAPER DELIVERY
Monday, November 12, 2001
Press '1' if convinced you're nuts
Touch-tone test matches 80 percent of diagnoses
Associated Press
CHICAGO - If automated touch-tone phone answering systems drive you bonkers, imagine one designed to see if you really are.
That's generally the idea behind an experimental program set up to screen older callers for early signs of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, and supporters say it's not as crazy as it sounds.
In a study of 155 patients, the system identified warning signs in 80 percent of patients who'd been diagnosed with mental impairments by their doctors. It also gave passing grades to 80 percent of patients diagnosed as normal.
The results appear in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.
Participants were given recorded instructions such as "Press '1' if the following sentence makes sense: 'We wanted to cut down the tree in the yard so we went to the garage to get a hammer,' " said psychologist James Mundt, a research scientist at Healthcare Technology Systems Inc. in Madison, Wis., and lead author of the study.
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© 2001,
a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.
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