Barbara J. Sahakian

The innovative brain.

Hot decision-making, involving the evaluation of reward and punishment, is essential to the entrepreneurial process and may be possible to teach, argue Barbara Sahakian and her coauthors. Comparisons of the performance of successful entrepreneurs and more conventional managers in cognitive tests could help define the nature of functional impulsivity. Then, perhaps, would-be entrepreneurs will be able to learn the art of hot decision-making characteristic of the breed.

Outcome variables in dementia trials: conceptual and practical issues

The aim of this chapter is to determine the roles of different assessment methods (including neuropsychological tests, psychiatric rating scales, global clinical scales and functional scales) in evaluating treatments for dementia, most especially Alzheimer’s disease (AD), with emphasis on neuropsychological assessment in trials of drugs designed to treat cognitive symptoms. We begin with a brief overview of issues in the diagnosis of dementia. We then review the desirable characteristics of instruments for evaluating dementia treatments, followed by a discussion of specific cognitive and other assessment instruments along with data on the extent to which they meet certain desirable validity, reliability and practicality criteria we detail below.