The Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia: reliability, sensitivity, and comparison with a standard neurocognitive battery

Studies of neurocognitive function in patients with schizophrenia use widely variable assessment techniques. Clinical trials assessing the cognitive enhancing effect of new medications have used neurocognitive assessment batteries that differed in content, length and administration procedures. The B...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Schizophrenia research 2004-06, Vol.68 (2), p.283-297
Main Authors: Keefe, Richard S.E, Goldberg, Terry E, Harvey, Philip D, Gold, James M, Poe, Margaret P, Coughenour, Leigh
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Antipsychotic Agents - therapeutic use
BACS
Biological and medical sciences
Clinical Trials as Topic
Cognition Disorders - diagnosis
Cognition Disorders - drug therapy
Cognition Disorders - psychology
Female
Humans
Male
Medical sciences
Neurocognitive assessment batteries
Neuropsychological Tests - statistics & numerical data
Practice (Psychology)
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychometrics
Psychometrics. Diagnostic aid systems
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Reproducibility of Results
Research Design
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia - diagnosis
Schizophrenia - drug therapy
Schizophrenic Psychology
Sensitivity and Specificity
Techniques and methods
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Studies of neurocognitive function in patients with schizophrenia use widely variable assessment techniques. Clinical trials assessing the cognitive enhancing effect of new medications have used neurocognitive assessment batteries that differed in content, length and administration procedures. The Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia (BACS) is a newly developed instrument that assesses the aspects of cognition found to be most impaired and most strongly correlated with outcome in patients with schizophrenia. The BACS requires less than 35 min to complete in patients with schizophrenia, yields a high completion rate in these patients, and has high reliability. The BACS was found to be as sensitive to cognitive impairment in patients with schizophrenia as a standard battery of tests that required over 2 h to administer. Compared to healthy controls matched for age and parental education, patients with schizophrenia performed 1.49 standard deviations lower on a composite score calculated from the BACS and 1.61 standard deviations lower on a composite score calculated from the standard battery. The BACS composite scores were highly correlated with the standard battery composite scores in patients ( r=0.76) and healthy controls ( r=0.90). These psychometric properties make the BACS a promising tool for assessing cognition repeatedly in patients with schizophrenia, especially in clinical trials of cognitive enhancement.
ISSN:0920-9964
1573-2509
DOI:10.1016/j.schres.2003.09.011