Description:
<p>ObjectiveCognitive impairment is common in multiple sclerosis(MS) and occurs at all stages of the disease witha significant negative effect on daily life activities,vocation, social relationships and quality of life.Analogical reasoning involves identifying a commonrelational system between two situations and thengenerating further inferences driven by these sharedcommonalities that is a fundamental aspect of humancognition people routinely use in everyday life, in awide range of problem-solving contexts and decisionmaking. The aim of the study is to evaluate analogicalreasoning skills in individuals with MS.Material and MethodThis observational case-control study covers 30MS patients without any cognitive complaint and 30 age-, sex- and education-matched healthyperson. All participants were underwent a thoroughneuropsychological evaluation with emphasis onworking memory, attention, executive functions andconcept formation and analogical reasoning.ResultsMS patients’ performance on working memory,attention and executive functions were worse incomparison to the control group. In general nodifference was observed regarding concept formation,abstraction, cognitive flexibility and analogicalreasoning between MS patients and healthy controls.However MS patients with advanced age exhibited apoor performance in these tasks which also showed amoderate correlation with disease duration.ConclusionCognitive dysfunction can be detected even in MSpatients who are relatively young and have lowdisability, without any cognitive complaints. Althoughearly cognitive reserves are sufficient for performancein analogical reasoning tasks similar to that of healthycontrols, they show significant deterioration withadvancing age<br></p>