Scores from the Mental Status Questionnaire (MSQ) obtained from interviews with a 1976 representative sample of community-dwelling elderly and 17 years of health care use data in the Manitoba Longitudinal Study on Aging were used to estimate the prevalence of cognitive impairment and the incidence rate of dementia diagnoses. Estimates of relative risk from Cox's proportional hazard models indicate that, in addition to age and sex, both MSQ scores and the presence or absence of a dementia diagnosis significantly affect mortality, whereas a diagnosis of dementia is the greatest contributor to institutionalization.
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