[Mini Mental State Examination and Brief neuropsychological Examination as neuropsychological screening tools]

An adequate neuropsychological evaluation is essential today to obtain a correct diagnosis in most neurological and geriatric areas. For these purposes, a number of screening and evaluation tools are in use to aid the neuropsychologist for diagnosis of cognitive disorder and for assessing the type of the disease.

The present research compares two neuropsychological tools, commonly used in the daily practice: the "Mini Mental State Examination" and the "Brief Neuropsychological Examination".

This study explores the neuropsychological profile of 56 post-stroke patients in rehabilitation phase. Patients were divided in three groups, in order to the stroke brain area: left, right and multinfarctual.

No significant difference in the three pathological groups were observed, in the mean MMSE-score. On the opposite, ENB demonstrated higher sensitivity and specificity in discrimination between pathological groups, but only on the descriptive level: for example, right-stroke patients performed worse in visuo-spatial tests while left-stroke patients had lower performance in verbal memory tests.

Our results showed an inadequacy of neuropsychological screening evaluation in post-stroke patients: both Mini Mental State Examination and the Brief Neuropsychological Examination appear to be inadequate to underline specific cognitive deficits in patients with different brain lesions; therefore it is important to consider the tools adequacy and the time-after-stroke when doing neuropsychological evaluation.