ATTENTION IMPAIRMENT IN RECENTLY DIAGNOSED MULTIPLE-SCLEROSIS

Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience cognitive disorders w hich can occur early in the course of the disease. The present study t ried to investigate attention abilities of MS patients at the early st age of the disease. Three attention modalities (sustained, simple and complex focused attention) were evaluated. The results show that MS pa tients at the early stage of the disease presented attentional dysfunc tion only when the cognitive load of the attention task was high and w hen controlled information processing was required. This suggests that MS patients probably suffer from a processing resources deficit witho ut modification of the attentional mechanisms.