VALIDITY OF PERSIAN ADULT READING TEST FOR THE ESTIMATION OF PREMORBID IQ

The present study was designed to investigate the relationship between the Persian Adult Reading Test (PART) and current intellectual ability in a group of elderly with and with out memory problems. Objective: Reading short and irregular words is the last ability preserved in dementia and brain degenerative diseases This ability shows the premorbid IQ of patients with memory deficit. Methods: Seventy-five subjects aged above 55 years (23 males and 52 females), visitors of 3 available elderly community houses in Shiraz, Iran, were requested to take part in the study. Four measures of cognitive ability were utilized: 1- The verbal paired association learning task (a sub-test of Wechsler Memory Scale) with delay recall; 2- Computing a series of mental arithmetic; 3- A task of reading 50 Persian words (PART); 4- Finally, they were requested to give response to Raven Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) as a measure of general intellectual ability (i.e., IQ). Results: Positive and significant correlations between PART scores and RSPM (r=0.36 for total sample; r=0.46 for males; r=0.35 for females), and PART and mental arithmetic task (r= 0.36 for total sample, r=0.44 for males; r=0.33 for females) were obtained. There were no significant differences between elderly subjects suspected of having dementia and those without memory deficit in PART scores (p=0.36) while the two groups were significantly different in RSPM scores (P<0.0001). Conclusions: These findings suggest that PART could be valid for the estimation of premorbid intellectual ability in elderly people, but further study on clinically diagnosed subgroup of dementic patients is required.