CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY IN A WORLD OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Rapid neuroscience and technological advances herald
a departure of some of neuropsychology’s traditional roles in health care but
opens many new opportunities. Just as clinical neuropsychology has thrived
decades after its use for determining the presence and location of a brain
lesion faded with the advent of modern neuroimaging, so will neuropsychology
thrive in an era when test administration is largely automated and its roles
will likely increasingly involve early cognitive change detection, evaluation
of therapies’ safety and efficacy, and selection of candidates for various
treatments. Activities such as brain mapping for surgery and determination of
language dominance are likely to remain neuropsychologist activities for some
time. New roles will include participation in clinical trials design,
behavioral medicine interventions for patients with cognitive compromise (e.g.,
medication adherence, exercise promotion to reduce risk of vascular disease),
and incorporation of genetics and biomarkers into understanding of
brain-behavior relationships and cognitive processes. Challenges facing
clinical neuropsychology have traditionally centered around the availability
and reimbursement for services and,
in the US, the assumption
of testing roles by technicians/psychometrists and computers;
neuropsychologists have become quite adept at dealing with these issues and
examples of collaboration with payers and development of testing guidelines
will be described. New challenges will be to train a new generation of neuropsychologists
with technological, biological, and clinical expertise relevant to a new world technology and public health and health care cost
reduction. The academician will have many new tools to test cognitive theories
and to participate in translational research, adapting animal findings to
bedside. To highlight some of these roles, examples of applications of
neuropsychology to neurotherpeutic technology will be selected from studies in
movement disorders.
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