[4] The ACE encompassed tests of five cognitive domains: attention/orientation, memory, language, verbal fluency, and visuospatial skills.
At the recommended cut-off scores of 88 and 83, the ACE was reported to have good sensitivity and specificity for identifying different forms of dementia and other impairments of memory and judgement (0.93 and 0.71; 0.82 and 0.96, respectively).
The ACE-III[6] was developed to improve the performance of certain parts of the test and also to avoid a potential copyright violation by replacing the elements shared with the MMSE.
This consists of 19 activities which test five cognitive domains: attention, memory, fluency, language and visuospatial processing.
Attention is tested by asking the patient for the date including the season and the current location; repeating back three simple words; and serial subtraction.
An example of this would be the tester asking the test taker to list every word they can think of that starts with the letter C. Language is tested by asking the patient to complete a set of sequenced physical commands using a pencil and piece of paper such as "place the paper on top of the pencil"; to write two grammatically-complete sentences; to repeat several polysyllabic words and two short proverbs; to name the objects shown in 12 line drawings, and answer contextual questions about some of the objects; and to read aloud five commonly-mispronounced words.
In the initial validation study[6] the cohort examined (n = 86; AD 28, FTD 33, controls 25) found the ACE-III to be acceptable and relatively quick to administer (15 min).