P159 Development of digital neuropsychological battery: a use case in Indian SLE patients

Abstract

Abstract Background/Aims While cognitive dysfunction and mood disorders are frequently reported as adverse effects of SLE, there is a scarcity of neuropsychological (NP) data for Asian SLE patients. Existing English-centric NP tests are inadequate for the linguistic and culturally diverse population. This study examines SLE's effects on mood and cognitive functions using an indigenously developed language-neutral digital NP test battery and validated anxiety, stress, depression and quality of life instruments. Methods We recruited SLE patients fulfilling 2012 SLE classification criteria as cases and caregivers (CG) and college students (CS) as controls aged above 18 years and at least 10th standard education. All participants provided written informed consent. Institutional ethics committees approved the study. The NP battery comprised five cognitive tasks: Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and modified versions of attention network test (ANT), sustained attention to response task (SART), picture naming and N-back, and five psychological tests (PHQ-9, GAD-7, STAI-T, PSS-4 and WHOQOL-BREF). Mann-Whitney test with conditional Bonferroni's corrections was used to compare cases with CG and CS. Results Total of 142 volunteers (age: median = 25.0, IQR = 9.0, cases [n = 82], CG [n = 40] and CS [n = 20]) participated in the study. Cases exhibited delayed response latencies in N-back, SART, and picture naming tasks compared to controls. They demonstrated reduced accuracy in all N-back conditions, with significant differences observed in hit rate, miss rate, false alarms, and d-prime scores compared to CS with effect size ranging from 0.298 to 0.736 (Table 1). However, the difference was only significant in the 2-back condition compared to CG. Cases displayed lower accuracy in SART Go trials (higher omission errors) than controls but better inhibition in SART No-Go trials (lower commission errors). No differences were observed in alerting, orienting and executive control functions. Cases showed significantly lower scores in MOCA than controls. Cases reported poorer psychological health through increased anxiety and stress levels and reduced WHO-quality of life scores compared to CG. Conclusion Contrary to earlier research that often relied on isolated cognitive assessments, our pioneering approach introduces a tailored test battery to establish cognitive baselines for Indian SLE patients. Disclosure P. Singhal: None. P. Srivastava: None. L. Rajasekhar: None. N. Samhitha: None.