HELPFUL AND USEFUL –

August 16, 2021 – Shrestha and Copenhaver, who are both researchers in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, have been studying drug treatment interventions and HIV prevention among people who use drugs for years. While conducting their studies, they realized as many as 60% of participants were suffering from cognitive dysfunction, or deficits in things like attention and short-term memory. This meant many participants did not gain the full benefit of the interventions the researchers were testing, because they could not process information and instructions in the same way as someone without cognitive dysfunction.

There were several existing assessment instruments that measure cognitive dysfunction, but they are too long and complex for the fast-paced nature of community drug treatment programs where staff have limited time to sit down with patients.

Copenhaver and Shrestha worked with John Gunstad, a neuropsychologist at Kent State University, to develop a simple, effective assessment tool to determine risk factors for cognitive dysfunction among opioid-dependent persons in drug treatment programs. They determined which measures from two longer inventories were most highly correlated with the outcomes of the full assessment. They recently published their findings in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

“This is a predictor of a more comprehensive battery,” Copenhaver says. “Because we can’t administer hours and hours of testing.”

The research team looked at two standard assessments for cognitive impairment, the Brief Inventory of Neuro-Cognitive Impairment (BINI) and the NIH Toolbox, which is regarded as the gold-standard of cognitive dysfunction assessments, to identify which risk factors to include on their own tool.

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