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Aims and objectives.  To identify the effects of applying Progressive Muscle Relaxation Technique on Quality of Life of patients with multiple Sclerosis. Background.  In view of the growing caring options in Multiple Sclerosis, improvement of quality of life has become increasingly relevant as a caring intervention. Complementary therapies are widely used by multiple sclerosis patients and Progressive Muscle Relaxation Technique is a form of complementary therapies. Design.  Quasi‐experimental study. Method.  Multiple Sclerosis patients (n = 66) were selected with no probability sampling then assigned to experimental and control groups (33 patients in each group). Means of data collection included: Individual Information Questionnaire, SF‐8 Health Survey, Self‐reported checklist. PMRT performed for 63 sessions by experimental group during two months but no intervention was done for control group. Statistical analysis was done by SPSS software. Results.  Student t‐test showed that there was no significant difference between two groups in mean scores of health‐related quality of life before the study but this test showed a significant difference between two groups, one and two months after intervention (p < 0·05). anova test with repeated measurements showed that there is a significant difference in mean score of whole and dimensions of health‐related quality of life between two groups in three times (p < 0·05). Conclusions.  Although this study provides modest support for the effectiveness of Progressive Muscle Relaxation Technique on quality of life of multiple sclerosis patients, further research is required to determine better methods to promote quality of life of patients suffer multiple sclerosis and other chronic disease. Relevance to clinical practice.  Progressive Muscle Relaxation Technique is practically feasible and is associated with increase of life quality of multiple sclerosis patients; so that health professionals need to update their knowledge about complementary therapies.

Various mental disorders are accompanied by some degree of cognitive impairment. Particularly in neurodegenerative disorders, cognitive impairment is the phenotypical hallmark of the disease. Effective, accurate and timely cognitive assessment is key to early diagnosis of this family of mental disorders. Current standard-of-care techniques for cognitive assessment are primarily paper-based, and need to be administered by a healthcare professional; they are additionally language and education-dependent and typically suffer from a learning bias. These tests are thus not ideal for large-scale pro-active cognitive screening and disease progression monitoring. We developed the Integrated Cognitive Assessment (referred to as CGN_ICA), a 5-minute computerized cognitive assessment tool based on a rapid visual categorization task, in which a series of carefully selected natural images of varied difficulty are presented to participants. Overall 448 participants, across a wide age-range with different levels of education took the CGN_ICA test. We compared participants’ CGN_ICA test results with a variety of standard pen-and-paper tests, such as Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), that are routinely used to assess cognitive performance. CGN_ICA had excellent test-retest reliability, showed convergent validity with the standard-of-care cognitive tests used here, and demonstrated to be suitable for micro-monitoring of cognitive performance.

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