This study aimed at investigating the clinical usefulness of the Mental Deterioration Battery (MDB) in the neuropsychological diagnosis and characterization of the dementia syndrome. In this paper, we report: (a) normative data for various test scores derived from the analysis of performance of 340 normal subjects living in urban areas; (b) an evaluation of the reliability of the single tests and of the battery as a whole in differentiating normal subjects from patients affected by cognitive deterioration derived from the analysis of performance of 130 normal subjects living in rural areas and 134 patients affected by probable Alzheimer’s dementia; (c) a cluster analysis of performances of the 340 normal subjects in the standardization group to evaluate possible criteria of homogeneity according to which the various MDB scores tend to aggregate; (d) an analysis of performance profiles of 183 patients with right monohemispheric focal lesions, 159 patients with left unilateral lesions with aphasia and 131 left-lesioned nonaphasic patients to evaluate the specificity of the single tests of the battery in documenting a selective impairment of one of the two cerebral hemispheres. Results confirm the reliability of the MBD in discriminating between normal and demented patients and provide indications for use of the battery in differentiating qualitative patterns of cognitive impairment.

(1988). Patterns of dissociation in comprehension and production of nouns and verbs. Aphasiology: Vol. 2, No. 3-4, pp. 351-358.

BICAMS (Brief International Cognitive Assessment for Multiple Sclerosis) has been recently developed as brief, practical and universal assessment tool for cognitive impairment in MS subjects. It includes the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT), the California Verbal Learning Test-2 (CVLT2) and the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised (BVMT-R) . In this study we aimed at gathering regression based normative data for the BICAMS battery in the Italian population. Healthy subjects were consecutively recruited among patient friends and relatives. Corrections for demographics were calculated using multivariable linear regression models. Test-retest reliability was assessed using the Pearson correlation coefficient. The BICAMS battery was administered to 273 healthy subjects (180 women, mean age 38.9 ± 13.0 years, mean education 14.9 ± 3.0 years). Test-retest reliability was good for all the tests. The study provided normative data of the BICAMS for the Italian population confirming good test-retest reliability which can facilitate the use of the battery in clinical practice, also for longitudinal patient assessments.

Cognitive dysfunction is considered one of the clinical markers of multiple sclerosis (MS). However, in the literature there are inconsistent reports on the prevalence of cognitive dysfunction, and separate data for the relapsing-remitting (RR) type of the disease are not always presented. In this study, we submitted 461 RRMS patients to a battery of neuropsychological tests to investigate their impairment in various cognitive domains. As a consequence of the exclusion criteria, the sample is not fully representative of the entire population of RRMS patients. In this selected sample, when only the eight scores of a core battery (Mental Deterioration Battery) were considered (with respective cutoffs), it emerged that 31% of the patients were affected by some degree of cognitive deficit. In particular, 15% had mild, 11.2% moderate and 4.8% had severe impairment. Information processing speed was the most frequently impaired area, followed by memory. When two other tests (SDMT and MCST) were added and cognitive domains were considered, it emerged that 39.3% of the patients were impaired in two or more domains. When four subgroups were obtained by means of cluster analysis and then compared, it emerged that information processing speed and memory deficits differentiated the still cognitively unimpaired from the mildly impaired MS patients. Significant associations were found between cognitive and clinical characteristics. However, due to the large sample size, clinically irrelevant relationships may also have emerged. Even with the limitations imposed by the sample selection and the possible underestimation of the prevalence and severity of cognitive dysfunction, these results seem to provide further evidence that information processing speed deficit may be an early and important marker of cognitive impairment in MS patients.