Validity of the Trail Making Test as an Indicator of Organic Brain Damage

Reitan, Ralph M.

doi:10.2466/pms.8.7.271-276

Cited by 3,210 publications

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“…The Stroop test was administered as an indicator of the ability to suppress an habitual response 35 . The trail-making test (TMT) was administered as a measure of psychomotor speed and mental flexibility 36 . As a further measure of mental flexibility, including the ability to alter cognitive sets, the Wisconsin card sorting test (WCST) 37 was administered and the ratio of perseverative errors to the number of trials administered used in our analysis.…”

Section: Methods Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

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CNVs conferring risk of autism or schizophrenia affect cognition in controls

Stefánsson

Meyer‐Lindenberg

Steinberg

et al. 2013

Nature

626

587

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In a small fraction of patients with schizophrenia or autism, alleles of copy-number variants (CNVs) in their genomes are probably the strongest factors contributing to the pathogenesis of the disease. These CNVs may provide an entry point for investigations into the mechanisms of brain function and dysfunction alike. They are not fully penetrant and offer an opportunity to study their effects separate from that of manifest disease. Here we show in an Icelandic sample that a few of the CNVs clearly alter fecundity (measured as the number of children by age 45). Furthermore, we use various tests of cognitive function to demonstrate that control subjects carrying the CNVs perform at a level that is between that of schizophrenia patients and population controls. The CNVs do not all affect the same cognitive domains, hence the cognitive deficits that drive or accompany the pathogenesis vary from one CNV to another. Controls carrying the chromosome 15q11.2 deletion between breakpoints 1 and 2 (15q11.2(BP1-BP2) deletion) have a history of dyslexia and dyscalculia, even after adjusting for IQ in the analysis, and the CNVonly confers modest effects on other cognitive traits. The 15q11.2(BP1-BP2) deletion affects brain structure in a pattern consistent with both that observed during first-episode psychosis in schizophrenia and that of structural correlates in dyslexia.Little information is available on whether or how rare CNVs conferring high risk of schizophrenia and/or autism affect physiologic function of otherwise normal brains. As none of these CNVs hitherto described are fully penetrant for the diseases, and both schizophrenia and autism affect cognition, we aimed to examine the possibility that the CNVs affect cognition in control carriers, those who do not suffer either disease or intellectual disability. We based our selection of CNVs on a literature search for CNVs associated with schizophrenia and/or autism ('neuropsychiatric CNVs'); this search produced 26 CNV alleles (Supplementary Table 1) 1-3 . These CNV alleles are rare, found in 0.002% to 0.2% frequency, and cumulatively in 1.16% of our sample of 101,655 genotyped subjects, representing approximately one-third of the Icelandic population ( Supplementary Tables 1 and 2).We used the subset of genotyped subjects born before 1968, without excluding patients, to examine the association of each neuropsychiatric CNV with reproductive outcome ('fecundity'), defined simply as the number of children each subject had by age 45. After correction for multiple comparisons, three neuropsychiatric CNVs were significantly associated with fecundity (Table 1). Subjects carrying the 16p11.2 deletion or the 22q11.21 duplication show reduced fecundity, with the effect in males significantly greater than in females (P 5 0.0083 and P 5 0.029 for the difference in effect by sex for the 16p11.2 deletion and the 22q11.21 duplication, respectively). In contrast, individuals carrying the 16p12.1 deletion have more children than do controls (Table 1). Those with deletions at 15q11.2(...

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Section: Methods Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For visual scanning and mental flexibility, TMT A and B 36 were used administered. Trail A is a measure of psychomotor speed and attention and trail B is thought to be a test of flexibility of thinking.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

CNVs conferring risk of autism or schizophrenia affect cognition in controls

Stefánsson

Meyer‐Lindenberg

Steinberg

et al. 2013

Nature

626

587

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“…The 10 stimulus sets were preceded by a practice item. First-choice accuracy ranged from 0 to 10, and second-choice accuracy was computed relative to first-choice score (range: 0–100%); Trail-Making Part B—the standard version of this number/letter sequencing and switching task was completed, with scoring of amount of time to completion, up to 300 seconds; 36 the Stroop Interference Test—Subjects read aloud 5 columns of 16 color names printed in a colored font that differed from the word (e.g., the word RED printed in a green font). Number of inhibitory errors was computed over 300 seconds.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Cognition, Executive Functioning, and Neuroimaging Correlates of Empathic Deficits in Frontotemporal Dementia

Eslinger

Moore

Anderson

et al. 2011

Journal of Neuropsychiatry

163

137

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The authors investigated aspects of interpersonal sensitivity and perspective-taking in relation to empathy, social cognitions, and executive functioning in 26 frontotemporal dementia (FTD) patients. Behavioral-variant FTD (bvFTD) patients were significantly impaired on caregiver assessments of empathy, although self-ratings were normal. Progressive nonfluent aphasia and semantic-dementia samples were rarely abnormal. In bvFTD, empathy ratings were found to be correlated with social cognition and executive functioning measures, but not depression. Voxel-based morphometry revealed that reduced empathic perspective-taking was related to bifrontal and left anterior temporal atrophy, whereas empathic emotions were related to right medial frontal atrophy. Findings suggest that bvFTD causes multiple types of breakdown in empathy, social cognition, and executive resources, mediated by frontal and temporal disease.

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“…Neuropsychological testing was performed to assess four cognitive domains: (1) memory (Logical Memory-II [delayed recall] and Visual Reproduction-II [delayed recall] from Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised, and delayed recall from the Auditory Verbal Learning Test) 12-15 ; (2) executive function (Trail Making Test B 16 , and Digit Symbol Substitution from Wechsler Adult Intelligent Scale-Revised); (3) language (Boston Naming Test 17 , and category fluency) 18 ; and (4) visuospatial skills (Picture Completion and Block Design from WAIS-R).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engaging in Cognitive Activities, Aging, and Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Population-Based Study

Geda¹,

Topazian²,

Lewis³

et al. 2011

Journal of Neuropsychiatry

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We investigated whether engaging in cognitive activities is associated with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in a cross-sectional study derived from an ongoing population-based study of normal cognitive aging and MCI in Olmsted County, Minnesota. A random sample of 1321 non-demented study participants ages 70 to 89 (n = 1124 cognitively normal persons and n = 197 subjects with MCI) was interviewed about the frequency of cognitive activities carried out in late life (within one year of the date of interview). Computer activities [OR (95% CI) = 0.50 (0.36, 0.71); p < .0001)], craft activities such as knitting, quilting, etc. [0.66 (0.47, 0.93); p = 0.019)], playing games [0.65 (0.47, 0.90); p = 0.010)], and reading books [0.67 (0.49, 0.94); p = 0.019)] were associated with decreased odds of having MCI. Social activities such as traveling were marginally significant [0.71 (0.51, 1.00); p = 0.050)]. Even though the point estimates for reading magazines, playing music, artistic activities, and group activities were associated with reduced odds of having MCI, none reached statistical significance. We could not expect to observe any difference between the two groups on the variable of reading newspapers since almost identical proportions of the two groups (97.4% of normals and 97.5% of the MCI group) were engaged in reading newspapers on a regular basis.

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Validity of the Trail Making Test as an Indicator of Organic Brain Damage

Cited by 3,210 publications

References 0 publications

CNVs conferring risk of autism or schizophrenia affect cognition in controls

CNVs conferring risk of autism or schizophrenia affect cognition in controls

Social Cognition, Executive Functioning, and Neuroimaging Correlates of Empathic Deficits in Frontotemporal Dementia

Engaging in Cognitive Activities, Aging, and Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Population-Based Study

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