Assessing cognitive functioning in individuals with cocaine use disorder

ABSTRACT

Introduction: There have been mixed findings assessing the impact of regular cocaine use on cognitive functioning. This study employed a comprehensive cognitive battery to compare the performance of individuals diagnosed with a cocaine use disorder (N = 3 abusers, N = 17 dependent) against the performance of two control groups: (a) non-drug-users, and (b) marijuana users who report no cocaine use (N = 7 marijuana abusers, N = 0 dependent, N = 13 marijuana users with no Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fourth Edition, DSM–IV, diagnosis).

Method: This one-session, between-participants, outpatient study was conducted at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Sixty research volunteers completed the study. Drug users in both groups had no signs of current intoxication, but had a positive urine toxicology—which indicated use within 72 hours in the cocaine use disorder group and within the past 30 days (depending on frequency of use) for the marijuana-using control group. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toolbox Cognition Battery was used to assess cognitive functioning across six domains: executive function, attention, episodic memory, working memory, processing speed, and language. Each participant’s score was also compared against a normative database adjusted for age.

Results: Although the mean cognitive scores for all groups fell within the normal range for all tests, marijuana-using control participants outperformed those with a cocaine use disorder on a cognitive flexibility and language measure.

Conclusions: Cognitive functioning of individuals diagnosed with cocaine use disorder was observed to be similar to that of control group participants on the majority of tasks and fell within the normal range when compared against normative data.

KEYWORDS:

• Addiction
• cocaine
• cognition
• impairment
• normative scores

Acknowledgements

The study was funded by an internal grant (C.H.) and conducted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology by the first author. We gratefully acknowledge Beatrice Rothbaum for assistance with participant testing. The authors would also like to thank Niall Bolger, Becca Franks, Qwynten Richards and Christopher Medina-Kirchner for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

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