The Robustness of Mini Mental State Examination Scores at Different Baseline Times of Testing in Psychogeriatric Patients upon Admission to the Hospital

To investigate possible differences in MMSE scores due to the time of testing at admission to the hospital, we randomly stratified eligible patients into two groups, and tested on the first day (n = 28) or the third day (n = 26) of admission, respectively. Both groups were retested on day seven, and there was no significant difference in delta values between the groups (p = .086). Scores at admission correlated closely with day seven scores (Spearman’s ρ 0.7; p < .001). Our results might be of clinical relevance since this may enable hospitals and institutions to choose individual baseline times for MMSE testing within the first week of hospitalization and still group the data as baseline, either as part of treatment evaluation or for research purposes.