A review of the Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale

Objectives: To explore the application, diagnostic accuracy and predictors effecting the performance of the Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale (RUDAS) in older populations living outside Australia. Design: A literature review was conducted using a simplified approach of thematic analysis. A comprehensive computerized search of peer reviewed published papers (2004–2017) was conducted in Academic Search Complete (EBSCO), Medline with Full-text, Pubmed and Google Scholar using the following search terms: Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale, sensitivity and specificity. Inclusion criteria were papers in which the RUDAS was used with older populations outside Australia and written in English. Results: Database and manual searching identified a total of 289 papers and after reviewing the abstracts, titles and full-text papers, 12 papers were included in this review. Outside the target populations of culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Australia, the RUDAS is applied internationally in Asia, Europe and Africa. The psychometric properties of the RUDAS were measured across these non-target population groups: sensitivity and specificity means, respectively were 80.9 (SD ±6.24; 95% CI) and 76.1 (SD ±12.2; 95% CI); RUDAS-MMSE mean correlation was 0.70 (SD ±0.14; 95% CI) and mean AUC (area under curve) for RUDAS was 0.83 (SD ±0.08; 95% CI). Conclusions: Findings from this literature review showed that the RUDAS has strong psychometric properties across many population groups who are culturally and linguistically diverse in several countries. These findings provide support to undertake further research to evaluate the use of the RUDAS within culturally and linguistically diverse communities in other countries.