Potential Impact of Age- and Education-Corrected Scores on HRNB Score Patterns in Participants With Focal Brain Injury

Abstract

Heaton, Grant, and Matthews (1991) presented an alternate scoring system for the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery (HRNB) using age-, education-, and gender-corrected T scores to replace the raw score system traditionally employed with the test. This study addressed the impact of using this system on the score patterns generated by the HRNB in 64 clients with localized injuries to one of four quadrants of the brain. Results showed that the raw scores show more overall impairment than do the T scores, but overall the systems are statistically equal in their ability to separate the localized groups. The patterns of differences among the systems also differ. Although these findings suggest overall equivalence of the systems, they also show that each may have strengths that will show up in different analyses. A process of using both scoring systems for their own unique information is advocated as most appropriate at the current time until additional research addresses the questions raised in this study and elsewhere.

The Effect of Age and Education Transformations on Neuropsychological Test Scores of Persons With Diffuse or Bilateral Brain Damage

“…Golden and van den Brock (1998) conducted a study based on neuropsychological testing of persons with focal brain lesions and concluded that the HGM method tended to produce more normal scores than would be expected based on raw scores. Reitan and Wolfson (2004) also reported that HGM transformations increased the number of normal scores among persons without brain damage and, to an even greater extent, among persons with brain damage.…”

Increasing the cutoff on the MMSE and DRS-2 improves clinical classification accuracy in highly educated older adults.

“…Although the majority of recent empirical investigations support the use of educationally corrected cutoffs (Anderson et al, 2007; Gomes et al, 2015; Freitas, Simões, Alves, & Santana, 2012, 2015; Ihle-Hansen et al, 2017; Malek-Ahmadi et al, 2015), some researchers remain cautious (Golden & van den Broek, 1998; Mungas et al, 2009) or outright skeptical about the utility of demographic adjustment (Gagnon et al, 2013; Kraemer, Moritz, & Yesavage, 1998). The purpose of this study was to further explore the issue.…”