Testing Mental Ability
April 13, 2004
(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- In order to diagnose a person with dementia, the patient must have reduced cognitive function. Ideally doctors would compare cognitive ability between two stages of the person’s life. However, most patients do not have tests until there is a problem. But new research finds the National Adult Reading Test may be the answer.
NART requires people to pronounce words that do not follow the usual rules of pronunciation. People who get more of these correct generally have higher mental functioning. Also, this function does not decline with age and even holds with individuals in the early stages of dementia.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland, looked at whether NART scores reduce with dementia. They also examined whether both non-demented and demented participants show the same association between mental ability in youth and NART scores in old age.
Study authors used recent NART scores from 509 participants and compared that to IQ scores from their youth. All of the participants had been part of an IQ survey as children in the 1930s. They say 45 of the participants developed dementia and 464 did not.
The study reports those with dementia scored lower on NART and had lower childhood IQ scores. After controlling for childhood mental ability, researchers say there was no difference in NART scores between the two groups. This means among the declining cognitive skills of a person’s brain in early dementia, the ability to perform NART stands out as an indicator of how good the brain used to be.
Study authors say the NART is a valid estimator of the cognitive ability a person had before the onset of dementia.
SOURCE: Neurology, 2004;62:1184-1186
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