Background With an increasingly aged, frail population that holds a disproportionate amount of wealth, clinicians (especially those with expertise in older adults) may be asked with more frequency to offer a clinical opinion on testamentary capacity (TC), the mental capacity to make a will. Method This paper reviews the legal criteria as well as the empirical research on assessment tools for ...

Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires a reliable neuropsychological assessment, but major barriers are still encountered when such tests are used across cultures and during the lifespan. This is particularly problematic in developing countries where most of the available assessment tools have been adapted from developed countries. This represents a major limitation as these tests, alth...

This paper describes the methods and sample characteristics of a series of Spanish normative studies (The NEURONORMA project). The primary objective of our research was to collect normative and psychometric information on a sample of people aged over 49 years. The normative information was based on a series of selected, but commonly used, neuropsychological tests covering attention, language, v...

We report results of our investigation of the case of a 34-year-old woman (YJ) who showed persistent left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) in daily living, frequently hitting obstacles or bumping into the wall, although her visuospatial ability was mostly preserved in paper and pencil neuropsychological tests. In order to clarify this apparent discrepancy, her eye fixation pattern was monitored...

BACKGROUND We suggest that the need to account for systematic error may explain the apparent lack of agreement among studies of maternal dietary methylmercury exposure and neuropsychological testing outcomes in children, a topic of ongoing debate. METHODS These sensitivity analyses address the possible role of systematic error on reported associations between low-level prenatal exposure to me...

OBJECTIVE To document how right hemisphere language dominance in neurologically normal right-handed individuals affects lateralization of face encoding and level of performance in neuropsychological tests. METHODS Three healthy right-handed adults with predominantly right hemisphere language activation during single-word or sentence-level processing were identified from 210 consecutive right-...

Clinicians can use the prevalence of low scores to help interpret test performance. However, this information is limited for most test batteries. In 2007, Crawford, Garthwaite, and Gault presented Monte Carlo simulation software for estimating the base rates of low scores for any battery of tests. The purpose of this study is to examine the accuracy of a Monte Carlo simulation program for estim...

This paper reviews the pros and cons of the traditional paper and pencil and the newer computerised neuropsychological tests in the management of sports concussion. The differences between diagnosing concussion on the field and neuropsychological assessment at follow up and decision making with regard to return to play are described. The authors also discuss the issues involved in interpreting ...

Background. Considerable research documents an association between pro- and anti-inflammatory markers and Alzheimer's disease (AD), yet the differential relation between these markers and neuropsychological functioning in AD and nondemented controls has received less attention. The current study sought to evaluate the relationship between peripheral markers of inflammation (both pro- and anti-i...

This article describes a systematic review on the research into postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) in noncardiac surgery to ascertain the status of the evidence and to examine the methodologies used in studies. The review demonstrated that in the early weeks after major noncardiac surgery, a significant proportion of people show POCD, with the elderly being more at risk. Minimal evidenc...