Neuropsychology Central

[dawnfrancis]

Hi there

This is my first visit to this site - it's wonderful!

I recently assessed a lady who sustained a left frontal injury in a car accident. I tried to assess her premorbid IQ using the Wechsler Test of Adult reading, but her performance was so poor the manual advised using this test as a prediction of premorbid IQ - even if the purely demographic method was used.

Does anyone know where I can get another demographic premorbid estimate from, preferably online? I'm panicking as the report deadline is in a few days......

Also, just out of interest, the client's poor reading could be due to developmental dyslexia or to the effects of her accident. Is there any way of differentiating the two hypotheses?

any suggestions very, very gratefully received!

Dawn

[Guest]

Hello dawnfrancis,

I wouldn't know how to distangle the dyslexia from the TBI symptoms, except by screening her personal history, school records and via heteroanamesis. Maybe you'd find some answers there. On the other hand, doing an exhaustive assessment and being under time pressure don't fit together. For clinical purpose it doen't matter that much, I guess, as the linguistic problems should be treated anyway.

If your patient sustained an injury to left frontal structures, doing a verbal test of intellectual functioning isn't the best option, one might say. Maybe there's an instrument available to you that doesn't put such a heavy load on language functions? Maybe try the Raven's Standard (or Coloured, as the patient seems to be rather low functioning at this very moment) Progressive Matrices. Or mix some of the WAIS III items together, looking for a symptomatic profile (i.e. low scores on the verbal subtests) and claiming that the non-verbal subtests give a better estimation of premorbid intellectual abilities. You can look up the manual, which subtests of the WAIS can best be used as a short-form. Together with the pure demographic account, these three posibilities should give an estimation that showed - at least - that you tried. Whatever you do, it's just an estimation of a sumscore (the IQ), that by itself doesn't say anything. So what's the point anyway?

Bye,
Helix

[Helix]

Oh well, that was me.