The association of education and socioeconomic status with the Mini Mental State Examination and the clinical diagnosis of dementia in elderly people.

The distribution of scores in the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) of women aged 70-79 years from a rural area of Cambridgeshire is reported. Increasing age, lower socioeconomic group and less education were all found to be associated with lower scores on MMSE. Of these, only increasing age was significantly related to an increase in the diagnosis of dementia.