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Tourette syndrome or Tourette's syndrome is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that begins in childhood or adolescence. It is characterized by multiple movement (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic. Common tics are blinking, coughing, throat clearing, sniffing, and facial movements. These are typically preceded by an unwanted urge or sensation in the affected muscles, can sometimes be suppressed temporarily, and characteristically change in location, strength, and frequency. Tourette's is at the more severe end of a spectrum of tic disorders. The tics often go unnoticed by casual observers.
In statistics and psychometrics, reliability is the overall consistency of a measure. A measure is said to have a high reliability if it produces similar results under consistent conditions:
"It is the characteristic of a set of test scores that relates to the amount of random error from the measurement process that might be embedded in the scores. Scores that are highly reliable are precise, reproducible, and consistent from one testing occasion to another. That is, if the testing process were repeated with a group of test takers, essentially the same results would be obtained. Various kinds of reliability coefficients, with values ranging between 0.00 and 1.00, are usually used to indicate the amount of error in the scores."
Neuropsychological tests are specifically designed tasks that are used to measure a psychological function known to be linked to a particular brain structure or pathway. Tests are used for research into brain function and in a clinical setting for the diagnosis of deficits. They usually involve the systematic administration of clearly defined procedures in a formal environment. Neuropsychological tests are typically administered to a single person working with an examiner in a quiet office environment, free from distractions. As such, it can be argued that neuropsychological tests at times offer an estimate of a person's peak level of cognitive performance. Neuropsychological tests are a core component of the process of conducting neuropsychological assessment, along with personal, interpersonal and contextual factors.
A tic is a sudden, repetitive, nonrhythmic motor movement or vocalization involving discrete muscle groups. Tics can be invisible to the observer, such as abdominal tensing or toe crunching. Common motor and phonic tics are, respectively, eye blinking and throat clearing.
Repeatability or test–retest reliability is the closeness of the agreement between the results of successive measurements of the same measure, when carried out under the same conditions of measurement. In other words, the measurements are taken by a single person or instrument on the same item, under the same conditions, and in a short period of time. A less-than-perfect test–retest reliability causes test–retest variability. Such variability can be caused by, for example, intra-individual variability and inter-observer variability. A measurement may be said to be repeatable when this variation is smaller than a pre-determined acceptance criterion.
Neuropsychological assessment was traditionally carried out to assess the extent of impairment to a particular skill and to attempt to determine the area of the brain which may have been damaged following brain injury or neurological illness. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, location of space-occupying lesions can now be more accurately determined through this method, so the focus has now moved on to the assessment of cognition and behaviour, including examining the effects of any brain injury or neuropathological process that a person may have experienced.
The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the 2007 edition of which is known as the PPVT-IV, is an untimed test of receptive vocabulary for Standard American English and is intended to provide a quick estimate of the examinee’s receptive vocabulary ability. It can be used with the Expressive Vocabulary Test-Second Edition (EVT-2) to make a direct comparison between the examinee’s receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. The PPVT was developed in 1959 by special education specialists Lloyd M. Dunn and Leota M. Dunn. The current version lists L.M. Dunn and his son D.M. Dunn as authors.
Stereotypic movement disorder (SMD) is a motor disorder with onset in childhood involving repetitive, nonfunctional motor behavior, that markedly interferes with normal activities or results in bodily injury. To be classified as SMD, the behavior in question must not be due to the direct effects of a substance or another medical condition. The cause of this disorder is not known.
The Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (KABC) is a clinical instrument for assessing cognitive development. Its construction incorporates several recent developments in both psychological theory and statistical methodology. The test was developed by Alan S. Kaufman and Nadeen L. Kaufman in 1983 and revised in 2004. The test has been translated and adopted for many countries, such as the Japanese version of the K-ABC by the Japanese psychologists Tatsuya Matsubara, Kazuhiro Fujita, Hisao Maekawa, and Toshinori Ishikuma.
The Porteus Maze test (PMT) is a psychological test. It is designed to measure psychological planning capacity and foresight. It is a nonverbal test of intelligence. It was developed by University of Hawaii psychology Professor Stanley Porteus.
The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination is a neuropsychological battery used to evaluate adults suspected of having aphasia, and is currently in its third edition. It was created by Harold Goodglass and Edith Kaplan. The exam evaluates language skills based on perceptual modalities, processing functions, and response modalities. Administration time ranges from 20 to 45 minutes for the shortened version but it can last up to 120 minutes for the extended version of the assessment. There are five subtests which include: conversational & expository speech, auditory comprehension, oral expression, reading, and writing. In the extended version all questions are asked while in the shortened version only a few questions are asked within each subtest. Many other tests are sometimes used by neurologists and speech language pathologists on a case-by-case basis, and other comprehensive tests exist like the Western Aphasia Battery.
The Benton Visual Retention Test is an individually administered test for people aged from eight years to adulthood that measures visual perception and visual memory. It can also be used to help identify possible learning disabilities among other afflictions that might affect an individual's memory. The individual examined is shown 10 designs, one at a time, and asked to reproduce each one as exactly as possible on plain paper from memory. The test is untimed, and the results are professionally scored by form, shape, pattern, and arrangement on the paper.
The Rivermead Post-Concussion Symptoms Questionnaire, abbreviated RPQ, is a questionnaire that can be administered to someone who sustains a concussion or other form of traumatic brain injury to measure the severity of symptoms. The RPQ is used to determine the presence and severity of post-concussion syndrome (PCS), a set of somatic, cognitive, and emotional symptoms following traumatic brain injury that may persist anywhere from a week, to months, or even more than six months.
The Test of Variables of Attention (T.O.V.A.) is a neuropsychological assessment that measures a person's attention while screening for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Generally, the test is 21.6 minutes long, and is presented as a simple, yet boring, computer game. The test is used to measure a number of variables involving the test takers response to either a visual or auditory stimulus. These measurements are then compared to the measurements of a group of people without attention disorders who took the T.O.V.A. This test should be used along with a battery of neuropsychological tests, such as a detailed history, subjective questionnaires, interviews, and symptom checklists before a diagnosis should be concluded.
The California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) is one of the most widely used neuropsychological tests in North America. As an instrument, it represents a relatively new approach to clinical psychology and the cognitive science of memory. It measures episodic verbal learning and memory, and demonstrates sensitivity to a range of clinical conditions. The test does this by attempting to link memory deficits with impaired performance on specific tasks. It assesses encoding, recall and recognition in a single modality of item presentation (auditory-verbal). The CVLT is considered to be a more sensitive measure of episodic memory than other verbal learning tests. It was designed to not only measure how much a subject learned, but also reveal strategies employed and the types of errors made. The CVLT indexes free and cued recall, serial position effects, semantic clustering, intrusions, interference and recognition. Delis et al. (1994) released the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C). The California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II) is an updated version of the original CVLT, which has been standardized and provides normative data.
The National Adult Reading Test (NART) is a widely accepted and commonly used method in clinical settings for estimating premorbid intelligence levels of English-speaking patients with dementia in neuropsychological research and practice. Such tests are called hold tests as these abilities are thought to be spared, or "held" following neurological injury or decline. The NART was developed by Hazel Nelson in the 1980s in Britain and published in 1982. The test comprises 50 written words in British English which all have irregular spellings, so as to test the participant's vocabulary rather than their ability to apply regular pronunciation rules. The manual includes equations for converting NART scores to predicted IQ scores on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
The Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery (LNNB) is a standardized test that identifies neuropsychological deficiencies by measuring functioning on fourteen scales. It evaluates learning, experience, and cognitive skills. The test was created by Charles Golden in 1981 and based on previous work by Alexander Luria that emphasizes a qualitative instead of quantitative approach. The original, adult version is for use with ages fifteen and over, while the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery for Children (LNNB-C) can be used with ages eight to twelve; both tests take two to three hours to administer. The LNNB has 269 items divided among fourteen scales, which are motor, rhythm, tactile, visual, receptive speech, expressive speech, writing, reading, arithmetic, memory, intellectual processes, pathognomonic, left hemisphere, and right hemisphere. The test is graded on scales that are correlated to regions of the brain to help identify which region may be damaged. The Luria-Nebraska has been found to be reliable and valid; it is comparable in this sense to other neuropsychological tests in its ability to differentiate between brain damage and mental illness. The test is used to diagnose and determine the nature of cognitive impairment, including the location of the brain damage, to understand the patient's brain structure and abilities, to pinpoint causes of behavior, and to help plan treatment.
The Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR) is a neuropsychological assessment tool used to provide a measure of premorbid intelligence, the degree of Intellectual function prior to the onset of illness or disease.
Judgment of Line Orientation (JLO) is a standardized test of visuospatial skills commonly associated with functioning of the parietal lobe in the right hemisphere. The test measures a person's ability to match the angle and orientation of lines in space. Subjects are asked to match two angled lines to a set of 11 lines that are arranged in a semicircle and separated 18 degrees from each other. The complete test has 30 items, but short forms have also been created. There is normative data available for ages 7-96.
The Autism – Tics, AD/HD, and other Comorbidities (A–TAC) is a psychological measure used to screen for other conditions occurring with tics. Along with tic disorders, it screens for autism spectrum disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other conditions with onset in childhood. The A-TAC has been reported as valid and reliable for detecting most disorders in children. One telephone survey found it was not validated for eating disorders.
References
- ↑ Esther Strauss (2006). A Compendium of Neuropsychological Tests: Administration, Norms, and Commentary. Oxford University Press. pp. 1042–. ISBN 978-0-19-515957-8 . Retrieved 19 August 2013.
- ↑ Jack M. Guralnik; Linda P. Fried; Eleanor M. Simonsick; Judith D. Kasper; Mary E. Lafferty (1 July 1995). The Women's Health and Aging Study: Health and Social Characteristics of Older Women With Disability. DIANE Publishing. pp. 39–. ISBN 978-0-7881-3122-6 . Retrieved 19 August 2013.
- ↑ Davide Martino; James F. Leckman (9 May 2013). Tourette Syndrome. Oxford University Press. pp. 113–. ISBN 978-0-19-979626-7 . Retrieved 19 August 2013.
- 1 2 Mary Vining Radomski; Catherine A. Trombly Latham (2008). Occupational Therapy for Physical Dysfunction. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 1140–. ISBN 978-0-7817-6312-7 . Retrieved 19 August 2013.
- ↑ Patricia Espe-Pfeifer; Jana Wachsler-Felder (30 April 2000). Neuropsychological Interpretations of Objective Psychological Tests. Springer. pp. 26–. ISBN 978-0-306-46224-5 . Retrieved 19 August 2013.
- ↑ Patrick Langdon; John Clarkson; Peter Robinson (28 February 2010). Designing Inclusive Interactions: Inclusive Interactions Between People and Products in Their Contexts of Use. Springer. pp. 33–. ISBN 978-1-84996-166-0 . Retrieved 19 August 2013.