Abstract
Exaggeration of cognitive symptoms or poor effort on cognitive testing has been addressed primarily in the traumatic brain injury literature. The present investigation aims to extend the evaluation of effort to the epilepsy monitoring setting, where base rates of failure on effort testing remain unknown for patients with intractable epilepsy (ES), psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES), or both conditions (ES+PNES). In addition, this investigation explores how well four measures of effort (DMT, LMT, TOMM, PDRT) distinguish between these diagnostic groups. Results show that 20% of the combined sample failed one or more effort measure. When examining failure rates for each diagnostic group, 22% of epilepsy patients, 24% of PNES patients, and 11% of ES+PNES patients performed suboptimally on one or more measure of effort. The utility of these effort measures to differentiate between these diagnostic groups appears limited. Further research is needed to clarify the base rate of poor effort in the epilepsy monitoring unit setting in general and in these three diagnostic groups specifically.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 552-566 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Clinical Neuropsychologist |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 1 2006 |
Funding
The authors thank Chantel M. S. Dearth and Chris Miara for their help with data collection. Thank you to Christi Patten for her comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This project was supported by the Epilepsy Foundation through the generous support of the American Epilepsy Society.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| American Epilepsy Society | |
| Epilepsy Foundation of America |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
- Psychiatry and Mental health
- Clinical Psychology
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
