Development and ageing across the lifespan using common (SKU: AG-P-146)
Futurehealth Plenary Talk by Kamran Fallahpour
This study established standardized age, gender and years of education norms for
subjects spanning nine decades for a newly developed battery of neuropsychological tests,
IntegNeuro. The battery is standardized and fully automated, using a computerized
touchscreen. The twelve neuropsychological tests of the battery were administered to 1007
male and female volunteers across the age range 6 to 82. Sensitive indicators of change
during development and ageing were widely obtained on comprehensive measures of
attention and working memory, learning and memory retrieval, and language, visuospatial
function, sensori-motor and executive function. Improvement tended to occur through to
the third and fourth decade of life, followed by gradual decrement and/or relatively
stabilized performance thereafter. These results strongly underscore the need for most
neuropsychological tests to norm according to age. Gender differences were obtained on
measures of sustained attention, verbal learning and memory, visuospatial processing and
motor function. Years of education in the adult cohort was reflected in better performance
on a range of verbal measures. The IntegNeuro test battery presented as a sensitive
indicator of normative function and provides a reference for assessing the presence of
abnormal cognition, for evaluation of treatment effects and for longitudinal case
management.
