Moreover, it poses enormous and ever-increasing costs on the progressively aging industrial societies.Įfficient treatment of cognitive impairment is urgently needed but not yet available.
Digit span repetition serial#
Moreover, normative data for serial testing may now be collected to assess normal learning curves as important comparative readout of pathological cognitive processes.Ĭognitive decline is a common feature of many neuropsychiatric diseases and among the strongest determinants of real-world functioning and quality of life in affected individuals ]. An optimal combination and timing of tests, as extractable from this study, will aid in controlling their impact. Practice effects are prominent particularly in the early phase of high-frequency repetitive cognitive testing of healthy well-performing subjects. Influence of confounding variables (age, IQ, personality) was minor. Few tests were non-susceptible to practice or limited by ceiling effects. Most tests exhibited a similar pattern upon repetition: (1) Clinically relevant practice effects during high-frequency testing until month 3 (Cohen's d 0.36-1.19), most pronounced early on, and (2) a performance plateau thereafter upon low-frequency testing. The neuropsychological test battery covered 6 major cognitive domains by several well-established tests each. Healthy adults (N = 36 47.3 ± 12.0 years mean IQ 127.0 ± 14.1 58% males) completed 7 testing sessions, distributed asymmetrically from high to low frequency, over 1 year (baseline, weeks 2-3, 6, 9, months 3, 6, 12). Since repeated neuropsychological testing is required for respective longitudinal study designs, occurrence, time pattern and magnitude of practice effects on cognition have to be understood first under healthy good-performance conditions to enable design optimization and result interpretation in disease trials. Hence, its reliable capture in long-term follow-up studies is prerequisite for recording the natural course of diseases and for estimating potential benefits of therapeutic interventions. Cognitive deterioration is a core symptom of many neuropsychiatric disorders and target of increasing significance for novel treatment strategies.
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