Spurious WAIS-R cholinergic profiles in schizophrenia

The Fuld (1984) cholinergic profile based on the WAIS and WAIS-R age scaled scores has been shown to have moderate sensitivity and varying degrees of specificity in identifying dementia of the Alzheimer's type. The utility of this algorithm has increasingly been in doubt. The present study used young, well-diagnosed schizophrenic inpatients, a nondemented population with known cognitive deficits, to examine the specificity of the Fuld profile and its relationship to demographic and neuropsychological indices. The results found that the subjects who demonstrated a positive cholinergic profile (15%) did not differ neuropsychologically from the remaining sample. In the absence of other discriminating neuropsychological functions, the index is merely an artifact of relatively higher verbal abilities in the context of lower performance skills.