THE REPEATABLE BATTERY FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL STATUS (RBANS) - PRELIMINARY CLINICAL VALIDITY

Neuropsychological assessment of older individuals with dementing illn esses has suffered from a lack of appropriately designed test instrume nts. The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological S tatus (RBANS) was developed for the dual purposes of identifying and c haracterizing abnormal cognitive decline in the older adult and as a n europsychological screening battery for younger patients. The entire b attery takes less than 30 minutes to administer, and yields scaled sco res for five cognitive domains. The current study reports preliminary clinical validity results with the RBANS, comparing very mildly dement ed patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease (n = 20) to patients with Huntington's disease (rt = 20) and normal controls (n = 40). Although the patient groups had essentially identical total sc ores on the RBANS, they exhibited opposite profiles, differing signifi cantly on four of the five subsections. The AD patients performed most poorly on Language, and Delayed Memory subsections, while the HD pati ents obtained their lowest scaled scores on the Attention and the Visu ospatial/Constructional subsections. These results are consistent with the neuropsychological profiles of these dementing disorders derived from lengthier standardized tests and experimental investigations. In addition, even those patients who performed above the suggested cut-of f points on the MMSE and the Dementia Rating Scale scored significantl y below their controls on the RBANS. These data suggest that the RBANS is effective at both detecting and characterizing dementia of differe nt etiologies.