[From psychometry to neuropsychological disability in multiple sclerosis: a new brief French cognitive screening battery and cognitive risk factors].

Introduction: Cognitive deficit in multiple sclerosis (MS) is a frequent early feature in the disease course, which conditions patients' overall disability. The goals of this study were to validate a reproducible brief screening battery written in French and to examine cognitive risk profiles in patients with a mild physical disability.

Methods: Cognitive performances of 40 patients with EDSS <4.5 were compared with those of a control group. The study was completed with an analysis of socio-demographic, clinical and psychological variables (questionnaires).

Results: Three tests were discriminative with satisfactory predictive values (positive: 88 percent; negative: 96 percent) and a time duration <30 minutes: PASAT (hard condition), backward digit span, learning stage of California Verbal Learning Test. Four variables were associated with cognitive deficit: educational level <11 years, age >40 years, pathological laughing-crying, unemployment.

Conclusions: Our brief battery is an easy and reproducible tool. Completed with warning signs indicating the need for neuropsychological screening, this tool provides the practitioner with a global means of assessing disease activity and potentially therapeutic efficacy.