Publication Abstract Display
Type: Published Abstract
Title: Demographically adjusted norms for the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT) in Spanish.
Authors: Cherner M, Suarez P, Rivera-Mindt M, Taylor MJ, Lazzaretto D, Grant I, Artiola i Fortuny L, Heaton R, and the HNRC Group
Year: 2010
Publication: Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society
Volume: 16 Issue: S1 Pages: 114
Abstract:OBJECTIVE: There are an estimated 425 million Spanish speakers in the world, approximately 30 million of whom live in the United States. A large proportion of people whose best language is Spanish reside in the region bordering the US and Mexico. Thus, appropriate interpretive standards are needed for neuropsychological assessment in this population. As part of a larger normative effort, we generated norms for a Spanish language version of the PASAT applicable to the US-Mexico borderland. METHOD: A native Spanish speaker was employed to audio record numbers for the PASAT stimuli. Computerized post-processing was used to order the numbers as they appear in the English version, with inter-stimulus times of 3.0, 2.4, 2.0, and 1.6 seconds per digit for each subsequent trial. Participants were 180 healthy native Spanish speakers from the Mexico border regions of Arizona and California. The sample was 58% women, ranged in age from 20 to 55 years (mean=37.2, sd=9.5) and in education from 0 to 20 years (9.9, 4.2). Raw PASAT scores were converted to scaled scores based on their distribution. The contribution of age, education, and sex to PASAT scaled scores was examined using a fractional polynomial regression equation to arrive at a demographically adjusted T-score. RESULTS: The proportion of neurologically normal subjects that would be categorized as impaired based on the existing English language norms was reduced by 11% when applying the Spanish language norms. Some degree of misclassification was present across all education ranges, although it tended to be more frequent among those with lower education. Scaled scores were 2 to 3 points higher, and T scores were an average of 4 points higher, with the new norms. We verified that age, education, and sex were unrelated to the resulting T-scores. Raw-to-scaled conversions and the adjusted T-score formula will be presented. CONCLUSIONS: Norms for this population result in fewer classification errors and add to the armamentarium of available assessment tools.

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