At least one is free and available on the Internet for qualified users. Several are research instruments that are not available to clinicians but are used in academic centers or in clinical trials. Most are commercial products, with costs ranging from $7.50 per test to several hundred dollars for a license with per-test costs on top of that. There are many CNTs available for clinical assessment. Such questions are rarely addressed, although that is really what the clinician needs. However, can it distinguish among the conditions in the differential diagnosis of ADHD (eg, anxiety, depression, OCD)? Similar questions arise when CNTs are used for dementia screening or concussion management. Test A, for example, can distinguish between patients with ADHD and normal controls. When such tests are reported in the medical literature, the developers assure us of their reliability and validity.ĭiscriminant validity, however, may not be a meaningful standard for a clinician. They are accurate to the millisecond and data can be stored for serial comparison of a patient’s results. Theoretically at least, computerized neurocognitive tests (CNTs) have the advantage of all 3 approaches: they can be administered relatively quickly and do not require a physician’s time they can be tailored to a specific clinical issue (eg, ADHD), concussion, or mild cognitive impairment, or they can be broad-spectrum and comprehensive and they are self-scoring and generate a report as soon as the test is done. The alternatives include an array of “mini-mental state” measures, from the ubiquitous Mini-Mental State Evaluation (MMSE), the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and the Saint Louis University Mental Status used by physicians to the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status, and the Neurobehavioral Cognitive Status Examination, primarily used by psychologists. ![]() It is hard to get sometimes and is not always well covered by insurance, including Medicaid and Medicare. The second is a gold standard formal neuropsychological evaluation. The first is based on a psychiatrist’s observations of a patient’s memory, attention, and thought processes during the mental status examination, complemented sometimes by symptom checklists for the patient or knowledgeable observers. There are 3 ways to assess a patient’s cognitive status: an easy way that is fast but unreliable a formal approach that is definitive but expensive and a number of alternatives in between.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |