The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS): Preliminary Clinical Validity

TLDR

Neuropsychological assessment of older adults with dementia has been limited by a lack of suitable test instruments. The study evaluates the preliminary clinical validity of the RBANS by comparing very mildly demented Alzheimer’s patients, Huntington’s disease patients, and normal controls. The RBANS is a brief (<30‑minute) battery that produces scaled scores across five cognitive domains. RBANS total scores were similar across groups, but distinct domain profiles differentiated Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s patients, confirming its sensitivity to detect and characterize dementia of varying etiologies.

Abstract

Abstract Neuropsychological assessment of older individuals with dementing illnesses has suffered from a lack of appropriately designed test instruments. The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) was developed for the dual purposes of identifying and characterizing abnormal cognitive decline in the older adult and as a neuropsychological screening battery for younger patients. The entire battery takes less than 30 minutes to administer, and yields scaled scores for five cognitive domains. The current study reports preliminary clinical validity results with the RBANS, comparing very mildly demented patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease (n = 20) to patients with Huntington's disease (n = 20) and normal controls (n = 40). Although the patient groups had essentially identical total scores on the RBANS, they exhibited opposite profiles, differing significantly on four of the five subsections. The AD patients performed most poorly on Language, and Delayed Memory subsections, while the HD patients obtained their lowest scaled scores on the Attention and the Visuospatial/Constructional subsections. These results are consistent with the neuropsychological profiles of these dementing disorders derived from lengthier standardized tests and experimental investigations. In addition, even those patients who performed above the suggested cut-off points on the MMSE and the Dementia Rating Scale scored significantly below their controls on the RBANS. These data suggest that the RBANS is effective at both detecting and characterizing dementia of different etiologies.