MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery: an official Czech adaptation for the detection of cognitive impairment due to schizophrenia spectrum disorders
Abstract
Cognitive impairment is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia spectrum disorders present in in the majority of cases and has a significant impact on the psychosocial functioning of patients. The MATRICS cognitive test battery (NIMH-MATRICS: Measurement and Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia; MAT-RICS Consensus Cognitive Battery; MCCB) is currently the most often used cognitive test battery for assessing the cognitive functions of patients with schizophrenia worldwide.
The adaptation of the MCCB battery to the Czech environment was realized in 2015, a validation study of classification accuracy on schizophrenia patients was conducted in 2020 and a normative study was completed in 2021. In the same year, an official Czech translation (www.matric-sinc.org) was also completed.
This version can be used for example in psychopharmacological studies. There was not enough information available to determine whether the normative data of the experimental version are comparable and applicable to the official version.
Thus, our study aimed to complete the preceding research and to determine the equivalence of both versions by comparing the experimental translation from 2015 with the official translation from 2021. For this purpose, we recruited a new cohort of patients with schizophrenia (SCH, n = 15) and compared it with data from two control cohorts from previous studies: a cohort of healthy control subjects was taken from the normative study (CON-H, n = 53) and patients with schizophrenia from the validation study (CON-SCH, n = 38).
The groups were matched by age, education, and sex using the statistical software R. A key finding was that the SCH and CON-SCH groups did not show statistically significant differences in any of the MCCB tests.
The CON-SCH group scored statistically lower than the CON-H group in all tests. The SCH group also scored statistically lower in all tests except the spatial span test from the WMS-III; however, a trend toward statistical significance was found in this test as well.
These results support the following findings: the experimental and the official Czech version of the MCCB appear to be equivalent; the normative data of the MCCB are also applicable within the scope of use of the official version; the MCCB is an instrument that significantly discriminates between healthy subjects and populations of patients with schizophrenia according to cognitive performance. Overall, we can recommend the official Czech adaptation of the MCCB battery as an effective tool for assessing the cognitive functions of patients with schizophrenia in Czech psychiatric hospitals.