Clinical Validity of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status among Patients with Schizophrenia in the Republic of Armenia

There is considerable interest in Armenia toward advancing research and applying evidence-based practice in the treatment of schizophrenia. An area of research that has made little progress is the standardization of reliable and valid tests to measure cognitive functions. The aim of the present study was twofold. The first goal was to adapt the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) into Armenian. The second purpose was to examine the clinical validity of the Armenian-language RBANS in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and healthy comparison controls. Seventy-seven patients with DSM IV TR diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, and 77 healthy individuals participated in the study. The cognitive performance of patients was compared with that of healthy controls and U. S. normative data. The Armenian-language RBANS demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties in terms of test validity and reliability. Relative to healthy controls, patients with schizophrenia exhibited impaired performance in all RBANS Index and Subtest tasks. Patients and comparison controls performed below the U. S. data with the greatest differences found in language and attention tasks. The present findings support that the Armenian-language RBANS is a good test for measuring cognitive functions in patients with schizophrenia and the general population. The performance differences between Armenian and U. S. samples highlight the limitation in using English-standardized normative data for cross-cultural studies. The results merit further investigation to disentangle cultural variations from cognitive disturbances.