A neuropsychologist can see a variety of disease processes from Parkinson's disease to Alzheimer's type dementia to head injuries, epilepsy, brain tumor, any disease process of the brain, a neuropsychologist can asses. Typically, what we do is we have a standard battery of tests that we then add or adjust depending on the disease process.
For example in Parkinson's disease, it's more challenging to do the fine motor tasks so we can augment that, whereas in traumatic brain injury for a younger person they typically have more intact motor functions and we can assess using maybe more rigorous measures.
If a person comes in with Alzheimer's type dementia, we can have a more memory-heavy battery because that is the primary feature of that disease category. With epilepsy or brain tumors where really the more eloquent, fine functions are detrimental, that can be effective through surgery. It's important to have maybe a lengthier battery, which we provide here at the Neuroscience Institute. A more comprehensive battery gets at the disease process in terms of predicting how a patient will do in recovery, how they're doing at that point in time and other benefits in terms of functionality that they can see after kind of a procedure or treatment moving forward.
