Assessment of cognition using the Rao's Brief Repeatable Battery of Neuropsychological Tests on a group of Brazilian patients with multiple sclerosis.

Abstract

To assess the cognition of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) using the Rao's Brief Repeatable Battery of Neuropsychological Tests (BRB-N). BRB-N was translated and adapted for control subjects. Subsequently, it was applied to a group of patients with relapsing-remitting (RR) MS. The assessment on the healthy controls (n=47) showed that the correlation between tests on the same cognitive domain was high and that there was a five-factor solution that explained 90% of the total variance. Except for the Word List Generation subset of tests, the performance of patients with RRMS (n=39) was worse than that of the healthy controls. BRB-N is a relatively simple method to assess cognition of patients with MS in the daily clinic. It does not take long to apply and does not require special skills or equipment.