Multiple Sclerosis, August
2001, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 255-262(8)
Memory tests were often developed
for healthy populations.
The accuracy of these measures is
reduced when administered to patients with neurological diseases, who may
experience physical and/or cognitive symptoms.
Also, methodological factors, for
example, spanning the ability spectrum, and content/format artefacts, may
contribute to a decline in test precision.
The aim of this study was to develop
a new test of memory, which addresses these issues.
The new memory test comprises assessments
of recall, paired association, and recognition, at a Task Familiarisation
stage and two difficulty levels, for both the verbal and spatial modalities.
It was administered to 85 healthy
individuals and 100 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).
All patients were able to attempt
each task of the new assessment, and there was no influence of visual integrity
or manual dexterity on memory test performance, supporting the applicability
of the tasks to patients with multiple sclerosis.
Both the standardisation and validation
samples demonstrated a wide range of scores on each section of the new
test, suggesting that the measure spanned an acceptably broad range of
abilities.
It seems probable, therefore, that
the new assessment offers a more exact measure of verbal and spatial recall,
paired association, and recognition memory.
Camp S.J. [1]; Thompson A.J. [1];
Langdon D.W. [2] *
[1] Department of Clinical Neurology,
Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK [2] Department
of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20
0EX, UK
Abstract: