The clinical characteristics of 2,789 consecutive patients in a memory clinic in China

To explore the clinical characteristics of the Memory Clinic patients at Huashan Hospital and to provide suggestions for future research, we retrospectively reviewed the demographic, cognitive and aetiological data from 2,789 consecutive patients who attended the Memory Clinic of the Department of Neurology at Huashan Hospital from April 2003 to April 2008. The demographical distribution of the patients was as follows: there were more females (58%) than males; 58% of the patients were older than 70 years of age; and most patients (77%) had six or more years of education. The distribution of the diagnoses was as follows: degenerative or vascular dementia, 46.4%; mild cognitive impairment, 22.8%; subjective cognitive impairment, 21.7%; neurosis, 3.3%; organic cognitive impairment, 3.9%; unspecified dementia, 1.2%; and pure amnesia, 0.7%. These results showed that older patients with relatively high levels of education comprised the majority of our sample and a high percentage of the patients showed absent or mild cognitive impairment. Accordingly, future studies should focus on early diagnosis and treatment for dementia. Detailed neuropsychological tests and follow-up assessments are becoming increasingly important in the diagnosis of memory diseases in China.