Cognitive Neuro-Assessment In Nigerian Africans – Predictive Validity Of A Computerized Testing

Abstract

The cognitive consequences of diseases of various body organs often significantly and adversely affect quality of life and this has resulted in increasing awareness of the importance of cognitive assessment to identify the impairments in different cognitive domains. The neuro-cognitive assessment has evolved from traditional psychometric testing to computerized testing which is able to detect subtle cognitive changes. The objective of this study is to determine the predictive validity of a computerized cognitive test battery, the Iron Psychology (acronym FePsy) among Nigerian Africans and compare its accuracy with a standard psychometric test, the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). A consecutive sample of 370 epilepsy patients were assessed with these cognitive tests and compared with 270 randomly selected age, sex and level of education matched apparently healthy controls. The patients comprised 228 (61.62%) males and 142 (38.38%) females and the controls were made up of 155 (57.40%) males and 115 (42.60%) females. The mean ages for the patients and controls were 29.4±11.6 and 31.6±17.4 years respectively. There are statistically significant differences in the performances of the patients with epilepsy (PWE) when compared with the controls with both cognitive tests (p<0.05). The educational level and the age of the subjects significantly affected their performances but the gender did not though the males performed better than the females. The MMSE is not as sensitive as the computerized cognitive tests and in addition it has a poor accuracy, despite its high specificity. We conclude that computerized neuro-cognitive assessment is superior to traditional psychometric testing with MMSE and recommends its use.

Keywords: Cognition, Epilepsy, Neuro-psychology, Nigerians, Validation

Annals of Biomedical Sciences Vol. 6 (1) 2007: pp. 28-44