Neuropsychological Tests And Influencing Factors For The Healthy Adults In Five Urban Districts,Chengdu City

Objectives To explore the neuropsychological characteristics of healthy adults in five urban districts in Chengdu city by using neuropsychological tests, and set up the range of normal values of neuropsychological tests in these areas. The results of these tests will be provided to set up the norms of the Chinese populations preliminarily. To analyze the influencing factors such as age, gender and education related to the cognitive function in healthy adults, too.Methods According to the population distribution of five urban districts in Chengdu city and the levels of age, gender and education to sample from the districts randomly. 496 healthy adults (248 males and 248 females) were administered with neuropsychological tests, including parts of Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, logical memory and visual reproduction subsets of Wechsler Memory Scale, Stroop test, verbal fluency, the Trail Making Test, Tower of Hanoi and Modified version of Wisconsi Card Sorting Tests. SPSS 11.5 was used to analyze the experimental data. Method of Parameter was used to analyze the normal distribution variances; Method of Non-parameter was used to analyze variances in skewness distribution. AMultivanate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) procedure was conducted to test the main and interactions effects of age, gender and education level on the administered neurosychological test scores. The method of Least Significant Difference(LSD) procedure was used to groups comparision which were stratified by the levels of age, gender and education; The rank-sum test was adminmistered to analyze the heterogeneity of variance data. Results1. The results of the neuropsychological tests on the 496 healthy adults coming from the five urban districts in Chengdu was provided, including means and standard deviations. These data in presented tables were stratified by gender, age and level of education.2. The cognitive function of the males including the scores of intelligence, attention and executive function were different from those of the females.3. Age and education were important factors which significantly influence the results of neuropsychological tests, and significant difference exist in the effects that age and educational levels having impacts on intelligence, memory, attention, verbal and executive functions.Conclusions1. The results of neuropsychological tests were obtained to understand the cognitive functions of the healthy adults from the five districts in Chengdu.2. Age, gender and educational level have significant effects on one or some cognitive functions in healthy adults.3. Neuropsychological test is a good tool to evaluate the cognitive function.