Neurocognitive Assessment
Within one week prior to their operation and on postoperative day four,
all patients were administered a Repeatable Battery Assessment of
Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) neuropsychological assessment, which
has been shown to detect even mild impairment in cognitive
function.4 This assessment comes in two forms, with
the questions administered before the operation being different than
those administered postoperatively but testing the same areas of
cognitive function. These include immediate and delayed memory,
language, attention, global cognition, and visuospatial function. Each
of these cognitive domains were scored to produce both a raw and scaled
score that were collectively added for a total score. The mean raw score
is 100 with a standard deviation of 15.6 and is the summation of each
cognitive domain. The scaled score is produced in reference to a
normative sample of healthy individuals and considers age and gender to
produce a score with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3. The
forms were administered by individuals who were native English speakers
and had been trained by a neuropsychologist. The pre and postoperative
tests were administered by the same individual for each patient.