The Use of RBANS among Inpatient Forensic Monolingual Spanish Speakers

The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) has been shown to be an effective screener for detecting neurocognitive impairments in English speaking forensic psychiatric inpatients, but no studies have examined whether the RBANS would have the same utility among monolingual Spanish speaking inpatients. This study sought to examine RBANS performance, as well as risk factors (i.e., educational, neurological, and medical) influencing RBANS performance, in that particular population.

The present study examined archival data collected from monolingual Spanish speaking inpatients (n = 34; mean age = 48.71, SD = 11.99; 85.3% men; 93.5% with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder). All participants must have RBANS data, and must not have a diagnosis of malingering or major neurocognitive disorder. Medical records of eligible participants were examined.

Our findings indicated that most participants (75.8%) performed in the impaired range for the RBANS Total Index; however, the frequency of impaired performances varied on more specific RBANS indices (42.4%-72.7% of the participants). Although neurological and medical risk factors were not associated with RBANS Total Index performance (all p's = .26-.82), years of education appeared to be inversely associated with RBANS Total Index score (all p's = .04-.07).

These findings can serve as the first step in helping to define "normative" cognition among Spanish speaking forensic psychiatric inpatients. Such findings can reduce the likelihood of over-pathologizing performance and increase the likelihood that treatment goals will be better tailored to the patient's cognitive ability.