Halstead-Reitan Test results in chronic hemodialysis

Neuropsychological functioning of chronic hemodialysis, undialyzed uremic, and medical-psychiatric patients was explored using the Halstead-Reitan Battery. The three groups of 16 patients each did not differ significantly in age, education, verbal intelligence, or degree of affective disturbance. Specific Halstead-Reitan Battery subtest comparisons demonstrated that dialysis patients performed significantly better than uremic patients and were equivalent to medical-psychiatric subjects on tasks of psychomotor problem-solving and spatial ability. Dialysis patients were significantly better than uremic subjects, but impaired relative to the medical-psychiatric patients on a task of flexible thinking. Dialysis patients were impaired relative to medical-psychiatric subjects and equivalent to uremic patients on tasks which required complex analysis, auditory information processing, language capacities, and sensory-perceptual functions.