The MMSE in Practice: the Medical Relationship Reflected through the Administration of a Neuropsychological Test

Abstract: In the last few decades, Alzheimer’s disease has progressively appeared as a new plague and has been constructed as a public health problem in the United States and then in most Western countries including France. The number of people afflicted with this illness has increased and public health actions have emphasized the need to improve diagnostics and create screening conditions to detect it earlier and earlier. Thus, in France in the 2000s, there were three successive national projects for battling Alzheimer’s. One of their chief objectives was to develop diagnostic consultations. This diffusion of the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and linked diseases was based on the establishment and spread of a number of neuropsychological tests of which the best known and most widely used is the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE).