Sensitivity and specificity of Frontal Assessment Battery in newly diagnosed and untreated Obstructive Sleep Apnea patients

Background: Executive dysfunction (ED) is often observed in subjects diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), but their assessment requires facilities that are not always available.We aim to evaluate the extent to which Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB) discriminates ED in newly diagnosed, untreated, and without-comorbidity OSA patients. Methods: Sixty subjects participated in the study. Of these, 40 (31 males and 9 females) were newly diagnosed for OSA through full-night polysomnography (apnea/hypopnea index; M . 39.01, SD . 27.16), untreated, with a mean age of 54.50 years (SD . 8.90), while the remaining 20 (15 males and 5 females) had no symptoms of OSA (M . 51.60 years, SD . 10.70). The instruments used were the following: Questionnaire for Sleep Apnea Risk, Epworth Sleepiness Scale, Mini-Mental State Examination, and FAB. Results: The group with OSA exhibited significantly lower values in the FAB global score (p . 0.003) and in Conceptualization (p . 0.001) and Mental Flexibility (p . 0.009) subtests. ROC analysis showed adequate discriminative capacity for the FAB global score (AUC . 0.74) and for Conceptualization (AUC . 0.75) and Mental Flexibility (AUC . 0.70) scores. Conclusions: The FAB is a short and no-time-consuming tool that can be used to investigate the presence of ED in untreated OSA patients with no comorbidities, providing clinicians with a simple and effective way of detecting the presence of this dysfunction and allowing a more informed decision for the need of a full neuropsychological assessment

Neuropsychological Performance in Patients with Asymptomatic HIV-1 Infection

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) lead to neurocognitive disorders; however, there is still much knowledge to be gained regarding HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders. The purpose of this study was to assess the cognitive performance, instrumental activities of daily living, depression, and anxiety in patients with asymptomatic HIV-1 infections compared with seronegative participants without neurocognitive impairment. We studied a sample consisted of 60 patients with asymptomatic HIV-1 infections and 60 seronegative participants without neurocognitive impairment from the city of Barranquilla, Colombia, with a mean age of 36.07 years. A protocol of neuropsychological and psychopathological tests was applied to the participants. The group of patients with asymptomatic HIV infections significantly underperformed on tasks that assessed global cognitive screening, attention span, learning, phonemic verbal fluency, auditory-verbal comprehension, information processing speed, cognitive flexibility, and motor skills compared to the group of seronegative participants. No significant differences were found in memory, visual confrontation naming, vocabulary, inhibition, and instrumental activities of daily living. Additionally, the patients with asymptomatic HIV-1 infection had a higher anxiety index than the seronegative participants, but no significant difference was found in depression. A correlation was found between depression and anxiety. In conclusion, the patients with asymptomatic HIV-1 infection had lower cognitive performances than the seronegative participants in the cognitive functions mentioned above and more anxiety but still performed the instrumental activities of daily living