Blessed – Dementia Scale (BLS-D)
Blessed-Roth Dementia Scale
Newcastle Dementia Scale
Blessed‚ 1968
Change in Performance of Everyday Activities
1. Inability to perform household tasks (1‚ ½‚ 0)
2. Inability to cope with small sums of money (1‚ ½‚ 0)
3. Inability to remember short list of items‚ e.g.‚ in shopping (1‚ ½‚ 0)
4. Inability to find way about indoors (1‚ ½‚ 0)
5. Inability to find way about familiar streets (1‚ ½‚ 0)
6. Inability to interpret surroundings (e.g. to recognize whether in hospital‚ or at home‚ to discriminate between patients‚ doctors and nurses‚ relatives and hospital staff‚ etc.) (1‚ ½‚ 0)
7. Inability to recall recent events (e.g. recent outings‚ visits of relatives or friends to hospital‚ etc.) (1‚ ½‚ 0)
8. Tendency to dwell in the past (1‚ ½‚ 0)
Changes in Habits
9. Eating:
Cleanly with proper utensils (0)
Messily with spoon only (2)
Simple solids‚ e.g. biscuits (2)
Has to be fed (3)
10.Dressing:
Unaided (0)
Occasionally misplaced buttons‚ etc (1)
Wrong sequence‚ commonly forgetting items (2)
Unable to dress (3)
11.Complete sphincter control:
Occasional wet beds (1)
Frequent wet beds (2)
Doubly incontinent (3)
Changes in Personality‚ Interests‚ Drive
No change (0)
12.Increased rigidity (1)
13.Increased egocentricity (1)
14.Impairment of regard for feelings of others (1)
15.Coarsening of affect (1)
16.Impairment of emotional control‚ e.g. increased petulance and irritability (1)
17.Hilarity in inappropriate situations (1)
18.Diminished emotional responsiveness (1)
19.Sexual misdemeanour (appearing de novo in old age) (1)
Interests retained (0)
20.Hobbies relinquished (1)
21.Diminished initiative or growing apathy (1)
22.Purposeless hyperactivity (1)
The inter-rater reliability for two raters was r= 0.59 (intraclass correlation = 0.30).
Blessed‚ G.‚ Tomlinson‚ B.E.‚ & Roth‚ M. (1968). The association between quantitative measures of dementia and of senile change in the cerebral grey matter of elderly subjects. British Journal of Psychiatry‚ 1114‚ 797-811.
Cole MG. (1990). Interrater reliability of the Blessed Dementia Scale. Can J Psychiatry‚35:328–330.
McDowell‚ I. & Newell‚ C. (1996). Measuring Health: A Guide to Rating Scales and Questionnaires. (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Zillmer‚ E.A.‚ Fowler‚ P.C.‚ Gutnick‚ H.N.‚ & Becker‚ E. (1990). Comparison of two cognitive bedside screening instruments in nursing home residents: a factor analytic study. Journal of Gerontology‚ 45‚ 69-74.
McDowell‚ Ian. (2006). Measuring Health: A Guide to Rating Scales and Questionnaires‚ Third Edition. Oxford University Press
