A brief neuropsychological testing battery for evaluating patients with schizophrenia

Current conceptualizations of schizophrenia include neurocognitive impairment, particularly in aspects of attention, memory, and executive functioning. Evaluation of these cognitive abilities typically involves use of comprehensive batteries which may take up to six hours to complete. The current study examined the effectiveness of a briefer battery to detect cognitive impairments usually seen in schizophrenia as established by previous studies using more lengthy and labor intensive protocols. The current study involved 61 outpatients with schizophrenia who were separated into three subgroups: paranoid type (n = 20), undifferentiated type (n = 21), and schizoaffective (n = 20). The majority of the patients were male (61%), African-American (52%), and of low socio-economic status. The mean age was 41.4 years (SD = 8.8), and the mean years of education was 11.7 (SD = 6.8). For the overall sample, results revealed mild to moderate impairments in memory, construction, concept formation, response set maintenance, psychomotor speed, and visual speed of information processing. Post-hoc analyses revealed significant differences between subgroups on Similarities and psychomotor speed, with the undifferentiated group performing more poorly than the paranoid or schizoaffective groups. In conclusion, the current brief battery minimized respondent burden in terms of both time demands and level of task complexity. However, it was also sensitive enough to capture many of the same cognitive weaknesses as those reported when using more labor-intensive neuropsychological test protocols.