Cambridge Psychometric Consultants: Cognitive Testing Consultancy to the Pharmaceutical and Biotech Sectors

What is cognitive testing?

The term 'cognitive testing' is used to describe the process of measuring an individual's ability to think, solve problems, concentrate, remember and respond. These cognitive processes underpin our everyday behaviour and can be affected by disease, injury, drugs and even mood. Damage to the brain, whether by disease or injury, can often give rise to problems with cognition.

Why use cognitive testing in drug development?

A major recent impetus has been the publication of guidelines specifying the use of cognitive testing in the development of drugs for Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy and a number of other disorders. However, there have always been good reasons to include cognitive testing at all stages of the drug development process:

Phase 1 - To test for behavioural toxicity and cognition enhancement in volunteers
Phase 2 - To assess drug safety and efficacy in small patient groups
Phase 3 - To provide primary/secondary efficacy data in pivotal studies
Phase 4 - To monitor drug efficiency and to differentiate licensed compounds

What makes a good cognitive test?

Essentially there are two main issues regarding test quality, reliability and validity. Reliability deals with whether the various components of a test measure the 'same thing' (the 'internal consistency' of a test). A second reliability issues is how consistently a test measures skill across time, so-called 'temporal' or 'test-retest' reliability. Validity relates to how successfully a test measures what it is designed to assess. A major issue in the selection of cognitive tests for use in clinical drug trials is a test's sensitivity to a drug intervention.