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	DEMQOL Dementia Quality of Life Measure	Geriatric Depression Scale
Field	Social Gerontology	Clinical Psychology
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	1982
Originator	Sarah C. Smith, Donna L. Lamping, Sube Banerjee & colleagues	Jerome A. Yesavage, Terry L. Brink, and colleagues
Type	Self- and proxy-report health-related quality-of-life measure for dementia	Age-appropriate depression screening
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.	Yesavage, J. A., Brink, T. L., Rose, T. L., Lum, O., Huang, V., Adey, M., & Leirer, V. O. (1982). Development and validation of a geriatric depression screening scale: A preliminary report. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 17(1), 37-49.
Aliases	DEMQOL, DEMQOL-Proxy, Dementia Quality of Life Measure, DEMQOL System	GDS, GDS-15, GDS-30
Related	3	5
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.	The Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) is a 30-item self-report depression screening instrument specifically designed for older adults. Developed by Yesavage, Brink, and colleagues in 1982, the GDS addresses the unique presentation of depression in aging populations, where symptoms may differ from younger adults. A validated 15-item short form (GDS-15) is widely used in primary care and community settings for rapid screening.