Neurocognitive Performances in Nigerian Africans with Chronic Renal Failure

Abstract

Chronic renal failure has been shown to adversely affect neuro-cognitive function; however there has been no information on this observation among Nigerian Africans with uremia. We studied sixty failure patients and sixty healthy controls using the Iron Psychology, the ‘Fepsy' - an automated neuropsychological test battery. The auditory and visual reaction times and the binary choice reaction task were utilised to assess the mental speed and attention of the subjects respectively. The groups did not differ significantly in age, education or gender. The cronic renal failure performed poorly in both visual and auditory reaction tasks compared to the controls but the attention span of the patients compared favourably with the controls. We concluded that chronic renal failure affects mental processing speed but has no significant effect on sustained attention in Nigerian Africans in a controlled prospective study.


KEY WORDS: Mental speed, attention, renal failure, Nigerians.


Nigerian Journal of Health and Biomedical Sciences Vol.3(2) 2004: 108-111