Abstract
The assessment of neuropsychological functions and especially dual-tasking abilities is considered to be increasingly relevant in the assessment of neurological disease, and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in particular. However, the assessment of dual-tasking abilities is hindered by specific software requirements and extensive testing times. We designed a novel e-health (progressive web application-based) device for the assessment of dual-tasking abilities usable in “bedside” and outpatient clinic settings and examined its reliability in a sample of N = 184 MS patients in an outpatient setting. Moreover, we examined the relevance of dual-tasking assessment using this device with respect to clinically relevant parameters in MS. We show that a meaningful assessment of dual-tasking is possible within 6 min and that the behavioral readouts overall show good reliability depending on dual-tasking difficulty. We show that dual-tasking readouts were correlated with clinically relevant parameters (e.g., EDSS, disease duration, processing speed) and were not affected by fatigue levels. We consider the tested dual-tasking assessment device suitable for routine clinical neuropsychological assessments of dual-tasking abilities. Future studies may further evaluate this test regarding its suitability in the long-term follow up assessments and to assess dual-tasking abilities in other neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Highlights
Cognitive dysfunctions are a frequent concomitant of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with a prevalence of 40 to 70% [1,2]
Due to the focus on the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect, the analysis was limited to the Reaction times (RTs) and the accuracy rates to the letter stimulus (S2)
The goal of the work was to examine how far the dual-tasking abilities examined in this task are relevant to clinical MS care by examining correlations between task performance and established clinical parameters on disease severity in MS
Summary
Cognitive dysfunctions are a frequent concomitant of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with a prevalence of 40 to 70% [1,2]. In the field of MS-research, dual-tasking has mostly been examined by assessing the performance of simple cognitive tasks while walking [24,25,26,27,28,29] or balancing [30,31]. These approaches, focusing on cognition-motor interactions [29], bear the problem that task difficulty is not parametrically scalable, and are possibly unsuitable to detect early dysfunctions and track disease progression [32]. The assessment is not controllable [33]
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