Neuropsychological short assessment of disease- and treatment-related intelligence deficits in children with brain tumours.

OBJECTIVE: The Wuerzburger Psychologische Kurz-Diagnostik (WUEP-KD) is a short screening battery for cognitive deficits in children with brain tumour. We report on its psychometric quality and testing efficiency.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: WUEP-KD was founded on Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) framework of cognitive abilities. We assessed the construct validity of the short battery by conducting factor analysis and the concurrent validity by multiple linear regressions with Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC). The concurrent validity was explored by multiple linear regressions with Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). The discriminant validity was examined by a reanalysis of harmful effects of brain tumour treatments in a medulloblastoma cohort.

RESULTS: The construct validity assessment revealed three neuropsychological domains: cognitive operations, executive abilities, and psychomotor abilities. The retest reliabilities for individual testing and the convergent coefficients of the WUEP-KD with K-ABC and WISC yielded satisfactory results. The cognitive effects of different treatment modalities in the medulloblastoma cohort matched exactly previously reported data on the decline of general intelligence scores and delivered the details for the harmful effects. An in-depth analysis based on Hedges' g effect sizes confirmed specific harmful late effects on all abilities of cognitive operations, on the executive ability of perceptual speed and on psychomotor ability of movement steadiness.

CONCLUSION: WUEP-KD is a valid and efficient short test instrument, which may be especially useful in larger cohorts, multicenter settings or if patients do not tolerate longer tests. Due to its foundation on the CHC framework, our findings provide a rationale to create a common data set along with scores from other factor-based tests in international studies.