The Brief Assessment of Cognition In Affective Disorders (BAC-A):performance of patients with bipolar depression and healthy controls.

BACKGROUND: Cognitive deficits in bipolar disorder are significant enough to impact everyday functioning. A key question for treatments aimed at cognition is which cognitive domains are most affected by bipolar disorder and which cognitive tests have the best psychometric characteristics for this population. METHOD: 432 patients assessed at study entry in a treatment study of bipolar depression were assessed with a version of a new cognitive measure - the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Affective Disorder (BAC-A), which assesses traditional cognitive constructs with six subtests measuring memory, processing speed, working memory, and reasoning and problem solving, and a new measure of affective processing. From the cohort of 432 patients, 309 were selected based upon their demographic similarities to a previously collected healthy control sample of 309 subjects. Patients and controls completed the traditional cognitive tests and the Affective Processing Test. Results. Patients with bipolar depression and healthy controls differed significantly on all cognitive measures (P<0.001). The two alternate forms of the Affective Processing Test were very similar in both groups. The most robust discriminator of the groups was a composite score that combined the six core cognitive subtests of the Brief Assessment of Cognition (BAC) with two of the measures from the Affective Processing Test. LIMITATIONS: Test-retest reliabilities of the individual Affective Processing Test measures were low. CONCLUSION: The BAC-A is sensitive to the cognitive impairments in bipolar disorder patients in traditional neuropsychological domains and in cognitive processes believed to be specifically impaired in affective disorders.

Norms and standardization of the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia (BACS).

According to the recommendations of the Measurement and Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (MATRICS) Neurocognition Committee, one of the desired characteristics of a cognitive battery for assessing cognition in schizophrenia studies and clinical trials is the availability of normative data. This report describes normative data collected on the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia (BACS) from 404 healthy controls with demographic characteristics matching the 2005 United States Census of English-speakers. The six test measures demonstrated the expected pattern of correlations with age, gender, and education. Individual test scores were converted into standardized (T and z) scores and composite scores that were corrected for age and gender. An education-correction factor was calculated and recommended only for non-schizophrenia patients. Eight different verbal memory tests were found to have equivalent levels of difficulty.