BackgroundThe Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS) was recently developed with the aim of describing the cognitive deficits after stroke. The scale consists of 10 tasks encompassing five cognitive domains: attention and executive function, language, memory, number processing, and praxis. OCS was devised to be inclusive and un-confounded by aphasia and neglect. As such, it may have a greater potential to be informative on stroke cognitive deficits of widely used instruments, such as the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) or the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which were originally devised for demented patients.ObjectiveThe present study compared the OCS with the MMSE with regards to their ability to detect cognitive impairments post-stroke. We further aimed to examine performance on the OCS as a function of subtypes of cerebral infarction and clinical severity.Methods325 first stroke patients were consecutively enrolled in the study over a 9-month period. The OCS and MMSE, as well as the Bamford classification and NIHSS, were given according to standard procedures.ResultsAbout a third of patients (35.3%) had a performance lower than the cutoff (<22) on the MMSE, whereas 91.6% were impaired in at least one OCS domain, indicating higher incidences of impairment for the OCS. More than 80% of patients showed an impairment in two or more cognitive domains of the OCS. Using the MMSE as a standard of clinical practice, the comparative sensitivity of OCS was 100%. Out of the 208 patients with normal MMSE performance 180 showed impaired performance in at least one domain of the OCS. The discrepancy between OCS and MMSE was particularly strong for patients with milder strokes. As for subtypes of cerebral infarction, fewer patients demonstrated widespread impairments in the OCS in the Posterior Circulation Infarcts category than in the other categories.ConclusionOverall, the results showed a much higher incidence of cognitive impairment with the OCS than with the MMSE and demonstrated no false negatives for OCS vs MMSE. It is concluded that OCS is a sensitive screen tool for cognitive deficits after stroke. In particular, the OCS detects high incidences of stroke-specific cognitive impairments, not detected by the MMSE, demonstrating the importance of cognitive profiling.

Neuropsychological testing is a milestone of good practice to document cognitive deficits in a rapidly aging population. The aim of this paper is to validate the Italian version of Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). We compared subjects performance at the Italian version of MoCA with performance at standard Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). The whole sample is composed of 287 subjects. All participants were administered three MoCA and a standard MMSE within 4 weeks. Through ROC analysis the optimal MoCA cut-off point was identified, showing high levels of sensitivity and specificity and an accuracy of .96, with 95% confidence interval. Intra rater reliability and intra rater reliability are highly significant with respect to the MMSE. Results highlight that MoCA is a valid instrument in clinical and research screening and monitoring of subjects affected by cognitive disorders. Further studies may be directed to the deepening of the reliability and validity of the test.

This study demonstrates that VMMSE is a valid instrument in clinical and research screening and monitoring of subjects affected by cognitive disorders. This study shows a significant correlation between videoconference assessment and the F2F one, providing an important impetus to expand studies and the knowledge about the usefulness of tele-assistance services. Our findings have important implications for both longitudinal assistance and clinical care of demented patients.

Emerging information and communication technology is changing medical and psychological practice by enabling the provision of services across time and distance, yet there are significant concerns about these applications. Given the emerging nature of trial evidence in teleneurology, our aim is to provide a narrative review, in order to investigate possible oncoming fields of applications that are very important in healthcare practices delivered to patients affected by neurological diseases. We will focus on the use of Tele-Health in neurological practice, highlighting the potential benefits of applying information and communication technology also to psychosocial and educational aspects of neurological diseases treatment. This work is based on PubMed search, manual search of published abstracts/conference proceedings, and consultation with investigators in neurological disease. We refer also to the broader Tele-Health research concerning mental diseases. Tele-Health has obvious advantages in rural areas, where it improves access to health services, obviating the need for patients and healthcare workers to travel and assuring continuance to healthcare services delivery. Even in urban areas, however, Tele-Health can improve access to health services and to information. It may sometimes also be cheaper than conventional practice, even if there is generally limited knowledge of the cost-effectiveness of Tele-Health services compared to conventional methods of delivering health services.

Dementia was one of the conditions focused on in an EU (European Union) project called “PARADISE” (Psychosocial fActors Relevant to brAin DISorders in Europe) that later produced a measure called PARADISE 24, developed within the biopsychosocial model proposed in the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF). The aims of this study are to validate PARADISE 24 on a wider sample of patients with mild to moderate dementia to expand PARADISE 24 by defining a more specific scale for dementia, by adding 18 questions specifically selected for dementia, which eventually should be reduced to 12. We enrolled 123 persons with dementia, recruited between July 2017 and July 2019 in home care and long-term care facilities, in Italy, and 80 participants were recruited in Warsaw between January and July 2012 as part of a previous cross-sectional study. The interviews with the patient and/or family were conducted by health professionals alone or as a team by using the Paradise data collection protocol. The psychometric analysis with the Rasch analysis has shown that PARADISE 24 and the selection of 18 additional condition-specific items can be expected to have good measurement properties to assess the functional state in persons with dementia.