Neurocognitive Testing Online Now Available
Problems with memory, inattention, distractibility and cognitive function are common symptoms of mood and anxiety disorders. They may also be side effects of the medications used to treat those conditions. Or they may be a sign of some other condition that needs to be evaluated.
How can these evaluated?
A key part of a comprehensive assessment of cognitive symptoms is a formal neurocognitive assessment.
CNS Vital Signs
We have used CNS Vital Signs as our primary neurocognitive assessment tool for many years.
It incorporates a number of well validated tests and these tests can be used more than once to help assess the relationship between psychiatric symptoms or psychiatric medications and cognitive function.
For example, one of our patients was very concerned that he was having a toxic reaction to his medications. However, it seemed to us that his memory problems were more closely tied to mood symptoms than to medication dose.
This is a key distinction since the appropriate response to a toxic reaction to medications might be to reduce, or at least change, medications. On the other hand, if memory problems are due to partially treated mood symptoms it might even make sense to increase medications in order to improve cognitive function.
CNS Vital Signs testing allowed us to alter medications and assess how that impacted cognitive function.
In the process we were able to demonstrate to our patient, and to ourselves, that medication side effects were not the main cause of his cognitive difficulty. And, as a result, we were able to help him achieve a sustained improvement in functioning.
CNS Vital Signs Online
We are now able to provide online neurocognitive tests using the same CNS Vital Signs testing platform.
This means that many more people will be able to benefit from this service, since an in-office session won’t have to be scheduled.
If you are a current patient, and are interested in learning about this service, talk to your clinician.
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