Trail making test in chronic toxic encephalopathy: Performance and discriminative potential

The objective of this study was to examine the influence of chronic toxic e ncephalopathy (CTE) on Trail Making Test (TMT) performance, with special fo cus on the discriminative potential of this test. We assessed TMT performan ce in patients diagnosed with CTE, patients with similar symptoms but no di agnosis, and healthy participants. Inferior performance was seen in CTE, an d increasing age had a negative effect on TMT performance only for the CTE group. This effect was most pronounced in TMT-B. However, the ability of th e TMT to identify CTE was low, whereas all healthy participants were identi fied as healthy. Thus, the sensitivity of TMT alone was low, but it succeed ed in correctly classifying normal subjects. The pattern of results indicat es that normal TMT performance may be seen in individuals with mild to mode rate brain syndromes, such as CTE, whereas poor performance should not be e xpected in healthy individuals.