Cognitive
Some of the most common deficits affect recent memory, attention, processing speed, visual-spatial abilities and executive function. Symptoms related to cognition include emotional instability and fatigue including neurological fatigue. Cognitive deficits are independent of physical disability and can occur in the absence of neurological dysfunction. Severe impairment is a major predictor of a low quality of life, unemployment, caregiver distress, and difficulty in driving; limitations in a patient's social and work activities are also correlated with the extent of impairment.
Cognitive impairments occur in about 40 to 60 percent of patients with multiple sclerosis, with the lowest percentages usually from community-based studies and the highest ones from hospital-based. Impairments may present at the beginning of the disease. Probable multiple sclerosis sufferers, meaning after a first attack but before a secondary confirmatory one, have up to 50 percent of patients with impairment at onset. Dementia is rare and occurs in only five percent of patients.
Measures of tissue atrophy are well correlated with, and predict, cognitive dysfunction. Neuropsychological outcomes are highly correlated with linear measures of sub-cortical atrophy. Cognitive impairment is the result of not only tissue damage, but tissue repair and adaptive functional reorganization. Neuropsychological testing is important for determining the extent of cognitive deficits. Neuropsychological rehabilitation may help to reverse or decrease the cognitive deficits although studies on the issue have been of low quality. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors are commonly used to treat Alzheimer's disease related dementia and so are thought to have potential in treating the cognitive deficits in multiple sclerosis. They have been found to be effective in preliminary clinical trials.
Read more about this topic: Multiple Sclerosis Signs And Symptoms
Famous quotes containing the word cognitive:
“Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully posited ‘reality’ ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“While each child is born with his or her own distinct genetic potential for physical, social, emotional and cognitive development, the possibilities for reaching that potential remain tied to early life experiences and the parent-child relationship within the family.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)