Normative data of a brief neuropsychological battery for Spanish individuals older than 49

Abstract

There is an increasing need for standardized assessment of cognition in older patients that is relatively brief, easy to administer, and has normative data adjusted for age and educational attainment. We tested 332 literate, cognitively normal, Spanish persons older than 49 years from the Memory Clinic of Fundació ACE, Institut Català de Neurociències Aplicades (Barcelona, Spain) with measures of cognitive information processing speed, orientation, attention, verbal learning and memory, language, visuoperception, praxis, and executive functions. Several of the tests were affected by age, education, and/or gender, but the language of administration (i.e., Spanish or Catalan) did not affect the test scores. Standardized scores and percentile ranks were calculated for each age and/or education group for use by clinical neuropsychologists.

Keywords:

• Neuropsychological assessment
• Aging
• Educational effects
• Verbal learning
• Cognition

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this manuscript was supported in part by the University of Pittsburgh Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (AG05133) and by funds from the Fulbright Commission to J.T.B.