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I don't recall seeing this before... Wednesday, January 07, 1998 By Judy Creighton -- The Canadian Press A new tool in the diagnosis of cognitive impairment caused by Alzheimer's disease, stroke and Parkinson's has been developed at Toronto's Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. The brainchild of neuropsychologist Dr. Edith Kaplan of Lexington, Mass., who has acted as consultant on the 10-year research project, the memory IQ test has been named B-KANS. This translates to Baycrest-Kaplan Assessment of Neuropsychological Status. "It consists of a set of several different types of tests," says Dr. Larry Leach, one of four psychologists who developed the test with Kaplan. "Essentially, the tests are designed to look at a person's ability to perform certain types of mental functions. Specifically, we want to test a person's memory, their attention, the reasoning and problem solving abilities and also manual skills." B-KANS improves upon the dozen or more tests currently available, tests which the researchers have found to be time- consuming, difficult to interpret due to small sample bases and in some cases, saddled with a perceptible bias. "To do it properly, you need to get a large enough sample of people because you want to make sure you have an equal number of men and women," he says, "and you want to have a range of ages because some of these functions or mental processes may change with age." This enables testers to compare persons with more or less their same age group. To do this, Baycrest selected the Psychological Corporation, which specializes in the development of psychological tests in the U.S., Leach says. "They go out to marketing research groups in different areas of the country so that you actually get a balance across different regional areas too," he explains. The corporation arranges for subjects to come in and take the test and "you get a sample size of around 1,000 people and ages that range from 20 to 80 years whose mental abilities are normal. We then get groups of patients with certain types of neurological diseases like Alzheimer's or stroke and we give them the same test that we did to those who are functioning normally." Leach says the testers then take what the normal people would do and compare what occurs with those suffering from some sort of brain disease. Leach says as cognitive diseases become understood, "better treatments get on board and the faster you can diagnose them and get them treated the more likely we are to keep patients from deteriorating." As a result, he says, patients will require less and less institutional care. "It may help treatment too. If you can define how well a person can do in one area but you can find their strengths, you may develop ways of compensating for that type of memory loss. They are only now getting a grasp of the biological cause of Alzheimer's, for example," he says. The real underlying cause may be discernible but "it's not known how to reverse it so what you do is wind up treating symptoms." The new approach having been well tested, is on the verge of being published in professional journals, Leach says. "When this happens it will be available to qualified psychologists, neurologists and will be used throughout North America." [log in to unmask] (Judith Richards)