Functional Assessment Staging (FAST) in Korean patients with Alzheimer's disease

Functional Assessment Staging (FAST) was devised to meet the need for a more brief patient-derived rating scale for evaluating changes in functional performance and activities of daily living skills in all the stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). FAST was administered to 464 patients with probable AD according to the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Diseases and Stroke/Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association (NINCDS-ADRDA) criteria. The patients were also evaluated using the Korean version of the Mini-Mental Status Examination (K-MMSE), the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), the Clinical Dementia Rating-Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB), the Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), the Barthel Activities of Daily Living (B-ADL), and the Seoul-Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (S-IADL). For patients with moderate to severe dementia, the Korean versions of the Severe Impairment Battery (SIB-Ko) and Baylor profound mental status examination (BPMSE-Ko) were also administered. There were significant correlations between the FAST and the K-MMSE scores (r= - 0.71, p< 0.001), between the FAST and the SIB-Ko scores (r= - 0.54, p< 0.001) and between the FAST and the BPMSE-Ko scores (r=- 0.46, p< 0.001). The FAST was also correlated with the CDR, the CDR-SB, the B-ADL, and the S-IADL (p< 0.001). Ultimately, FAST is a reliable and valid assessment technique for evaluating functional deterioration in AD patients throughout the disease course. Moreover, the findings of the present study suggest that the FAST elucidates a characteristic pattern of progressive, ordinal, and functional decline in AD in Korean AD patients with dementia.