Depression and performance on the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status

ABSTRACT

There is strong evidence that depression is associated with neuropsychological deficits across multiple domains. However, research on this topic has spanned a variety of measures with different psychometric properties and normative samples, which prevents drawing definitive conclusions about the pattern of neuropsychological deficiencies. The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) is a brief neurocognitive battery that is routinely used in clinical settings and provides co-normed measures of attention, language, memory, and visuospatial/constructional skills. The present study examined the association between depression and RBANS performance in a sample of 66 18–65 year-old adults who completed a neuropsychological evaluation at an outpatient clinic. Results indicated that depressed participants, relative to controls, demonstrated poorer performance in immediate and delayed memory, attention, and visuospatial/constructional abilities, and the four domains were diminished to a similar degree. These results were replicated using a continuous measure of depression symptoms. In addition, the association between depression and delayed memory was at least partially due to current psychotropic medication. The present study suggests that the RBANS is sensitive to the neuropsychological deficits typically found in depression, such that mild to moderate depression in adult outpatients is associated with comparable deficits in attention, memory, and visuospatial/constructional abilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• depression
• memory
• neuropsychology
• visuospatial

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Emilie Botbol for her assistance on this project.