Early deterioration in cognitive function with SLE

Cognitive function declines early in the course of systemic lupus erythematosus, a study shows. Cognitive impairment occurs in 30—75% of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), wrote the authors in their paper published in the Journal of Rheumatology.   They compared the cognitive ability of 111 patients with recently diagnosed SLE with 79 healthy controls. Thinking speed and efficacy were assessed the Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics (ANAM) computerised test. Clinical disease characteristics were assessed in relation to cognitive performance. After adjusting for age, gender, ethnicity, and education, SLE patients scored significantly lower than controls on the ANAM measures of substitution immediate recall, continuous performance, matching to sample, and Sternberg subtest. Whilst the study reports no significant associations between cognitive performance and SLE medications or most laboratory measures, patients with higher scores on a standard lupus damage scale and the Calgary depression scale had poorer performance on the spatial recognition test. Lupus severity was also associated with worse performance on the continuous performance test, and a higher erythrocyte sedimentation rate correlated with poorer performance on matching to sample. In particular the authors note that "recently diagnosed SLE patients with mild SLE-related disease/damage had cognitive impairment even before significant neuropsychiatric manifestations." This, they suggest, indicates that deterioration in cognitive functioning are present early in the course of SLE. Reference Petre, M. Naqibuddin, M. Carson, K. et al. 2008, ‘Cognitive Function in a Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Inception Cohort’ Journal of Rheumatology, vol. 35, pp. 1776-1781....