Neuropsychological Assessment
What is neuropsychological assessment?
Neuropsychology is a specialty within psychology that focuses on understanding brain-behavior relationships. Neuropsychological assessment is a comprehensive evaluation that helps you understand personal strengths and weaknesses in different thinking skills like memory, attention, and language.
These evaluations can help you understand your current cognitive abilities and get tailored recommendations to improve your daily life. Neuropsychological assessment is also sometimes used to help your medical providers better understand your medical conditions and whether your symptoms might fit with certain disorders (e.g., dementia) or to establish a baseline if there are concerns about future worsening of symptoms.
Who should get neuropsychological assessment?
Anyone who is noticing significant changes in their thinking abilities or their ability to complete their normal daily tasks might benefit from a neuropsychological assessment. Some conditions where people commonly benefit from a neuropsychological assessment include:
Concussion/Traumatic brain injury
Alzheimer’s disease/Dementia
Parkinson’s disease
Stroke
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Chronic illness
Long COVID
Cognitive changes in aging
You are encouraged to talk about the possibility of getting a neuropsychological assessment with your current medical providers to get their input on whether a neuropsychological assessment is a good fit for you at this time.
What are the benefits of getting a neuropsychological assessment?
Neuropsychological assessment can help you, your loved ones, and your medical team better understand your cognitive symptoms and how to address them. This type of evaluation can help your medical team clarify any diagnoses related to your cognitive concerns and recommend appropriate interventions. This evaluation can also help you learn targeted strategies to improve your thinking skills through addressing things like mental health symptoms, sleep difficulties, and pain. Our clinic also offers Cognitive Rehabilitation services which focus developing specific tools to compensate for the difficulties you are having.
What does a neuropsychological assessment include?
Review of medical records.
An intake appointment to learn about your concerns. If you would like to have a family member or friend join you to share their perspective on your symptoms, you are welcome to do so.
Several hours of standardized testing to evaluate your thinking skills in areas including memory, attention, language, problem solving, rapid processing of information, visual processing, and motor coordination.
A feedback session/discussion of your results including tailored recommendations to help improve your symptoms.
Consultation with referring providers and a comprehensive testing report is also included the evaluation.
At Pacific Brain Health & Wellness, cognitive testing occurs in-person at our office in West Seattle, but all other portions of the evaluation are available via telehealth, if preferred.
How do I schedule a neuropsychological assessment?
Call our clinic at (206) 880-1851 or click the button below. We will then complete a free 15-minute consultation call to ensure this service is a good fit for your needs. Consultation calls are often available within 1 business day and are always returned by one of our doctors.
