ABSTRACT
References 67
Dementia is a fundamentally neuropsychological concept, describing the cognitive and behavioural impact of a brain disorder which brings about an unravelling of the mind’s workings: ‘neuro’ plus ‘psychological’. Dementia can be the earliest manifestation of brain illness, and emerging signs of cognitive change often provide the first inkling that something is not quite right. A brief cognitive screening test is usually given by a geriatrician or neurologist and the result may be enlightening, but if the signs are subtle it may not. In any case, if the clinician suspects dementia is a possibility, a neuropsychological referral is often made to characterize any decline in cognition with comprehensive testing based on psychometric principles and with reference to robust normative data sets. The emergence of clinical neuropsychology as a mainstream specialty discipline in hospital outpatient clinics (e.g. so-called ‘memory clinics’) has allowed for the quantitative evaluation of cognitive decline with the kind of metric resolution which health-care professionals might reasonably expect of an empirical investigation.
