Clinical Dementia Rating

The Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) is a five-point staging scale used to characterise the severity of dementia, originally developed by Hughes and colleagues at Washington University in 1982. A clinician rates the person across six domains — memory, orientation, judgement and problem solving, community affairs, home and hobbies, and personal care — based on a structured interview with the person and an informant. Domain scores are combined into a global CDR of 0 (no impairment), 0.5 (very mild / questionable), 1 (mild), 2 (moderate), or 3 (severe). CDR is widely used in dementia research and clinical trials to describe cohorts, set inclusion criteria, and track disease progression. In accessibility and HCI work it appears as a way to characterise study participants with dementia.