Deans' stroke musings: Development and evaluation of a self-administered on-line test of memory and attention for middle-aged and older adults

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Development and evaluation of a self-administered on-line test of memory and attention for middle-aged and older adults

Your doctor should be extremely familiar with these in order to get you into the right stroke protocol to prevent your descent into dementia.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnagi.2014.00335/full?

Angela K. Troyer^1,2*,

Gillian Rowe^1,2,

Kelly J. Murphy^1,2,

Brian Levine^2,3,

Larry Leach¹ and

Lynn Hasher^2,3

¹Neuropsychology and Cognitive Health Program, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Toronto, ON, Canada
²Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
³Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Toronto, ON, Canada

There is a need for rapid and reliable Internet-based screening tools for cognitive assessment in middle-aged and older adults. We report the psychometric properties of an on-line tool designed to screen for cognitive deficits that require further investigation. The tool is composed of measures of memory and executive attention processes known to be sensitive to brain changes associated with aging and with cognitive disorders that become more prevalent with age. Measures included a Spatial Working Memory task, Stroop Interference task, Face-Name Association task, and Number-Letter Alternation task. Normative data were collected from 361 healthy adults age 50–79 who scored in the normal range on a standardized measure of general cognitive ability. Participants took the 20-minute on-line test on their home computers, and a subset of 288 participants repeated the test 1 week later. Analyses of the individual tasks indicated adequate internal consistency, construct validity, test-retest reliability, and alternate version reliability. As expected, scores were correlated with age. The four tasks loaded on the same principle component. Demographically-corrected z-scores from the individual tasks were combined to create an overall score, which showed good reliability and classification consistency. These results indicate the tool may be useful for identifying middle-aged and older adults with lower than expected scores who may benefit from clinical evaluation of their cognition by a health care professional.

More at link including references.