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	DEMQOL Dementia Quality of Life Measure	Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment
Field	Social Gerontology	Social Gerontology
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	1993
Originator	Sarah C. Smith, Donna L. Lamping, Sube Banerjee & colleagues	Andreas E. Stuck, Laurence Z. Rubenstein and colleagues (meta-analytic synthesis)
Type	Self- and proxy-report health-related quality-of-life measure for dementia	Multidimensional interdisciplinary diagnostic and care-planning process
Seminal source	Smith, S. C., Lamping, D. L., Banerjee, S., Harwood, R., Foley, B., Smith, P., ... & Knapp, M. (2005). Measurement of health-related quality of life for people with dementia: development of a new instrument (DEMQOL) and an evaluation of current methodology. Health Technology Assessment, 9(10), 1-93.	Stuck, A. E., Siu, A. L., Wieland, G. D., Adams, J., & Rubenstein, L. Z. (1993). Comprehensive geriatric assessment: a meta-analysis of controlled trials. The Lancet, 342(8878), 1032-1036.
Aliases	DEMQOL, DEMQOL-Proxy, Dementia Quality of Life Measure, DEMQOL System	CGA, Geriatric Assessment, Multidimensional Geriatric Assessment, Interdisciplinary Geriatric Evaluation
Related	3	3
Summary	DEMQOL is a measurement system for assessing health-related quality of life in people with dementia, capturing how the condition affects emotional well-being, cognition, and daily living. Developed by Sarah Smith, Donna Lamping, Sube Banerjee, and colleagues and published in 2005 in Health Technology Assessment, it was created to fill the lack of a rigorously developed, dementia-specific quality-of-life instrument and to evaluate the methodology of existing measures. The system has two complementary versions: DEMQOL, a 28-item interviewer-administered self-report completed by the person with dementia, and DEMQOL-Proxy, a 31-item version completed by a family or professional carer. Items cover domains such as feelings and emotions, memory and cognition, and everyday life, answered on a simple ordinal scale and summed into a quality-of-life score. By providing both a patient and a proxy perspective, the system acknowledges that self-report becomes harder as dementia progresses while still privileging the person's own voice where possible. It has been validated across the severity range and is widely used in dementia research and service evaluation.	Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is a multidimensional, interdisciplinary diagnostic process that evaluates an older person's medical, functional, cognitive, psychological, social, and environmental status and translates the findings into a coordinated, monitored plan of care. Rather than treating a single presenting complaint, CGA assumes that vulnerability in late life is multifactorial and that problems in one domain spill over into others. Stuck and colleagues' landmark 1993 meta-analysis of controlled trials showed that CGA is not merely descriptive: when it includes control over the implementation of recommendations and structured follow-up, it reduces mortality, increases the chance of living at home, and improves physical and cognitive function. The same synthesis clarified that assessment alone, without the power to act on findings and to follow patients over time, yields little benefit. CGA thus reframed geriatric care around systematic, team-based evaluation linked to action. It became the organizing model for geriatric medicine units, outpatient geriatric clinics, and home-assessment programs worldwide. The method is best understood as a process, not a single scale, even though it is built from many validated instruments.