Assessment of cognition using the Rao's Brief Repeatable Battery of Neuropsychological Tests on a group of Brazilian patients with multiple sclerosis.
To assess the cognition of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) using the Rao's Brief Repeatable Battery of Neuropsychological Tests (BRB-N).


METHODS
BRB-N was translated and adapted for control subjects. Subsequently, it was applied to a group of patients with relapsing-remitting (RR) MS.


RESULTS
The assessment on the healthy controls (n=47) showed that the correlation between tests on the same cognitive domain was high and that there was a five-factor solution that explained 90% of the total variance. Except for the Word List Generation subset of tests, the performance of patients with RRMS (n=39) was worse than that of the healthy controls.


CONCLUSIONS
BRB-N is a relatively simple method to assess cognition of patients with MS in the daily clinic. It does not take long to apply and does not require special skills or equipment.
Department of Physiology, Medical School, UNIMES, MS Reference Center DRS-IV, Santos, SP, Brazil. joseph3b@gmail.com
Joseph Bruno Bidin
JB
Brooks
Mariana Cossi Monseff
MC
Borela
Yara Dadalti
YD
Fragoso
D000328:Adult; D001938:Brazil; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009103:Multiple Sclerosis / Q000150:complications*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014175:Translating; D055815:Young Adult