La Paglia Filippo, La Cascia Caterina, Rizzo Rosalinda, Riva Giuseppe, La Barbera Daniele
Department of Experimental Biomedicine and Clinical Neuroscience, University of Palermo, Italy.
Stud Health Technol Inform. 2012;181:98-102.
Executive functions are often impaired in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We used a Virtual Reality version of the Multiple Errand Test (VMET) - developed dusing the free NeuroVR software (http://www.neurovr.org) - to evaluate the executive functions in daily life in 10 OCD patients and 10 controls. It is performed in a shopping setting where there are items to be bought and information to be obtained. The execution time for the whole task was higher in patients with OCD compared to controls, suggesting that patients with OCD need more time in planning than controls. The same difference was found in the partial errors during the task. Furthermore, the mean rank for and for interpretation failures is higher for controls, while the values of divided attention and the of self correction seems to be lower in controls. We think that obsessive patients tend to work with greater diligence and observance of rules than controls. In conclusion, these results provide initial support for the feasibility of VMET as assessment tool of executive functions. Specifically, the significant correlation found between the VMET and the neuropsychological battery support the ecological validity of VMET as an instrument for the evaluation of executive functions in patients with OCD.
执行功能在强迫症（OCD）中常常受损。我们使用了虚拟现实版的多项任务测试（VMET）——使用免费的NeuroVR软件（http://www.neurovr.org）开发——来评估10名强迫症患者和10名对照者在日常生活中的执行功能。该测试在一个购物场景中进行，其中有要购买的物品和要获取的信息。与对照者相比，强迫症患者完成整个任务的执行时间更长，这表明强迫症患者在规划方面比对照者需要更多时间。在任务过程中的部分错误方面也发现了同样的差异。此外，对照者在解释失败方面的平均排名更高，而对照者的注意力分散和自我纠正的值似乎更低。我们认为，强迫观念患者往往比对照者更勤奋且更遵守规则地工作。总之，这些结果为VMET作为执行功能评估工具的可行性提供了初步支持。具体而言，VMET与神经心理测验之间发现的显著相关性支持了VMET作为评估强迫症患者执行功能工具的生态效度。
