Requisite Skills and the Meaningful Measurement of Cognition

In 1931, the noted neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, along with his supervisor Lev Vygotsky, led an expedition from Moscow to Uzbekistan with an honorable objective: to understand cognition in a population with low educational levels. However, they concluded that the minimal educational background of the population could prevent these individuals from engaging in the basic elements of a cognitive evaluation and that existing cognitive tests were not valid for their study population, so they created specialized tests that would be more appropriate. The study by Stone et al shares features of this expedition 90 years ago. Some of our era ’s leading scientists have conducted an equally honorable collaborative project in the rural province of Ningxia, China, to assess individuals with chronic schizophrenia who have never received antipsychotic medications. By examining this population, the authors aimed to address the problem of the exclusion of underserved individuals from research on serious mental illness and to examine the longitudinal cognitive trajectory of schizophrenia in its natural untreated condition. The authors found that, in their cross-sectional sample, the duration of untreated psychosis was associated with wor se cognitive performance. They specifically reported the association between cognition and the duration of chronic untreated psychosis as having partial Spearman correlation coefficients of 0.35 for the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia, S...
Source: JAMA Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Source Type: research