Validation of the Brief Test of Attention in patients with Huntington's disease and amnesia

We report two studies of auditory divided attention in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and organic amnesia using the Brief Test of Attention (BTA). In the first study, 27 patients with HD were individually matched with 27 normal control subjects on the basis of age and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores. The patients and normal adults also did not differ in sex, race, or education. Despite the fact that mean MMSE scores were 28.8 (SD = 1.0) for both groups, the HD patients scored three SDs below the mean of normal adults on the BTA. In the second study, 9 nondemented amnesic patients and 9 normal adults who were individually matched for age, sex, race, and education produced no significant group differences on the Brief Test of Attention. These results show that BTA performance in impaired in a group known to have severe defects in attention, and that it does not require intact memory for successful performance.