The Rao’s Brief Repeatable Battery and Stroop test: normative values with age, education and gender corrections in an Italian population

Abstract

The Brief Repeatable Battery of Neuropsychological Tests (BRB) is by far the most widely used instrument to estimate cognitive dysfunction in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. However, the paucity of normative data currently limits its applicability. We administered the BRB to 200 healthy subjects to obtain normative values. Moreover, we assessed the influence of demographic factors on the test scores and calculated corrections for these relevant factors. To test executive functions not explored by the BRB, we also included the Stroop word-color task (ST). Higher educational level was associated with better performance on all the tests, except for the world list generation (WLG) and the ST, considering version A, and on Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT), Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT) and Selective Reminding Test-Delayed (SRT-D), considering version B. Females performed better than males on the WLG considering version A, and on the SRT-Long-Term Storage (SRT-LTS) and SRT-Consistent Long-Term Retrieval (SRT-CLTR) considering version B. Increasing age was associated with worse performance on the ST in version A, and on the SRT-LTS, SRT-CLTR and WLG in version B. Our data can improve the applicability of the BRB for both clinical and research purposes.

Long-term effect of early treatment with interferon beta-1b after a first clinical event suggestive of multiple sclerosis: 5-year active treatment extension of the phase 3 BENEFIT trial

“…31 Comprehensive neuro psychological and functional MRI studies have shown impaired cognitive function in up to 60% of patients with clinically isolated syndromes. [32][33][34] The observations in BENEFIT with repeated measurements of the PASAT, a standardised measure of working memory and attention, seem to suggest that in follow-up tests with the PASAT, most control patients improve but …”

Evaluación neuropsicológica en 129 pacientes chilenos con esclerosis múltiple recurrente remitente previo a inicio de fármacos inmunomoduladores

“…En la misma línea, en la literatura se señalan diversas definiciones de DC usando como instrumento de medición la BNR-R. Ellas se fundamentan en la existencia de alteración en 2, 3, 5 ó más subtest de la misma con rendimiento bajo 2 DS de un control de referencia como punto de corte [22][23][24] .…”

“…Respecto del perfil de la afectación cognitiva de nuestros pacientes, observamos también lo referido por otros autores en cuanto a mayor compromiso de la memoria verbal, velocidad de procesamiento de la información y fluencia verbal [22][23][24][25][26][27] .…”

Stroop Color and Word Test

“…Additionally, they calculated an interference score derived by the original scoring method provided by Stroop (1935). Of the five studies (Barbarotto et al, 1998;Caffarra et al, 2002;Amato et al, 2006;Valgimigli et al, 2010;Brugnolo et al, 2015) that provide normative data for the Italian population, two are originally written in Italian (Caffarra et al, 2002;Valgimigli et al, 2010), while the others are written in English (Barbarotto et al, 1998;Amato et al, 2006;Brugnolo et al, 2015). An English translation of the title and abstract of Caffarra et al (2002) is available.…”

“…An English translation of the title and abstract of Caffarra et al (2002) is available. Three of the studies consider the performance only on the SCWT (Caffarra et al, 2002;Valgimigli et al, 2010;Brugnolo et al, 2015) while the others also include other neuropsychological tests in the experimental assessment (Barbarotto et al, 1998;Amato et al, 2006). The studies are heterogeneous in that they differ in terms of administered conditions, scoring procedures, number of items, and colors used.…”