Heart Transplant Candidates: A Neuropsychological Descriptive Database

Abstract

Clinical psychologists working in medical settings are increasingly broadening their services to include consultation to cardiac transplant programs. These services may include the neuropsychological assessment of end-stage cardiac patients, who as a group are at risk for neuropsychological impairment. This paper provides descriptive neuropsychological data partitioned by age, race, and educational level from a sample of 760 end-stage cardiac patients who underwent neuropsychological testing as a routine part of a comprehensive heart transplant candidacy evaluation. Between one-fourth and one-third of the sample obtained scores that fell two standard deviations or greater below the expected performance (using available norms) on 11 of the 19 test variables. Performance difficulties were most commonly found on tests of manual speed, psychomotor speed, mental speed, and verbal learning and memory. This descriptive report improves upon previously published papers that were limited by relatively small sample size and failure to partition test results across important demographic characteristics.