The Philadelphia Brief Assessment of Cognition (PBAC): a validated screening measure for dementia.

The Philadelphia Brief Assessment of the Cognition (PBAC) is a brief dementia-screening instrument. The PBAC assesses five cognitive domains: working memory/executive control; lexical retrieval/language; visuospatial/visuoconstructional operations; verbal/visual episodic memory; and behavior/social comportment. A revised version of the PBAC was administered to 198 participants including patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (n = 46) and four groups of patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) syndromes: behavioral-variant FTD (bvFTD; n = 65), semantic-variant primary progressive aphasia (PPA) (svPPA; n = 22), non-fluent/agrammatic-variant PPA (nfaPPA; n = 23), and corticobasal syndrome (CBS; n = 42), and a group of normal controls (n = 15). The total PBAC score was highly correlated with the MMSE. The criterion validity of the PBAC was assessed relative to standard neuropsychological test performance. Using standard neuropsychological test performance as a criterion, the total PBAC score accurately ide...