The Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease (CERAD) was established in 1986 by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), to standardize procedures for the evaluation and diagnosis of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The neuropsychology battery’s use has increased beyond clinical assessment for AD, to include identification of mild cognitive impairment, differential diagnosis of more recently identified dementias, use in major epidemiological surveys world-wide, and for cognitive assessment of modifiable risk factors for AD. Translation into ~20 different languages and development of norms has facilitated such use.

Provided by the Duke Aging Center

The neuropsychological assessment battery form includes a guide to administration and scoring of each measure, the measure itself when this is appropriate (e.g., the Constructional Praxis designs), and related score sheets. The Boston Naming, and Word List Memory/Learning and Word List Recognition tests require flip books for administration; guidelines for preparing these are available. Administration time is usually 20-30 minutes.

The full CERAD battery includes the following measures:

• J1. Verbal Fluency (semantic fluency, naming as many animals as possible in 60 seconds)
• J2. Confrontational naming (CERAD 15-item abbreviation of the Boston Naming Test (Kaplan et al., 1978) available only with permission of the copyright holder, ProEd. https://www.proedinc.com/Reprint-Permissions.aspx)
• J3. Brief cognitive screen (MMSE; Folstein, et al., 1975) available only with permission of the copyright holder, Par Inc. (https://www.parinc.com/programs-partnerships/permissions-and-licensing).
• J4. Word List Memory/Learning (10 common nouns administered on three successive occasions, each time in a different order)
• J5. Constructional Praxis (copying four designs (Rosen et al., 1984))
• J6. Word List Recall (free recall of the 10 nouns presented earlier)
• J7. Word List Recognition (recognition of the 10 nouns presented earlier, embedded with 10 foils)
• J8. Recall of Constructional Praxis (free recall of the four designs presented earlier)

The core CERAD neuropsychology assessment battery excludes the Boston Naming test and MMSE from the core battery. The core battery includes measures which do not require additional permissions: J1 Verbal Fluency, the three Word List tasks (J4 Word List Learning/Memory, J6 Word List Recall, J7 Word List Recognition), J5/J8 Constructional Praxis copy and recall.

This assessment is a standardized instrument for rating behavioral abnormalities in demented or cognitively impaired individuals. Items are scaled according to their frequency of occurrence. The scale is informant-based and consists of 46 items which can be categorized into clinically relevant domains, i.e., depressive features, psychotic symptoms, behavioral dysregulation, irritability/agitation, vegetative features, apathy, aggression, and affective lability. Items marked with a superscript^s allow for reduction to a shorter, 17 item version. The BRSD comes with a comprehensive instruction manual, the psychometric characteristics of the BRSD, scoring forms, scoring tables, instructions to informant and response cards.

A table of languages which the CERAD Neuropsychological Assessment Battery has been translated into is available below.

The BRSD has been translated into: Arabic (items in a different order), French, Hebrew (subset of 29 items), Japanese, Spanish, and Korean.