The Canberra Interview for the Elderly: a new field instrument for the diagnosis of dementia and depression by ICD-10 and DSM-III-R.

The Canberra Interview for the Elderly (CIE) has been developed as a field instrument for identifying cases of dementia and depression, doing so strictly according to the diagnostic criteria in both the draft ICD-10 and DSM-III-R. It has been designed to be administered by lay interviewers. Information is gathered from the subject and an informant, and is then processed by computer algorithm to generate diagnoses. In a sample of 76 elderly patients attending a hospital clinic, test-retest reliability was found to be high at the level of individual items. For the diagnoses made on two occasions, agreement was comparable with other standardized psychiatric interviews designed for lay administration in the community. Validity, other than content validity, remains to be assessed. The CIE and its diagnostic algorithms are an efficient tool for clinical and epidemiological research on dementia and depression among elderly people, where close adherence to international criteria is required.