Grasso MG, et al. – The physicians assessed the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation in a group of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. They demonstrated that the multidisciplinary rehabilitation treatment was the best approach to treat MS. The specific effect of each treatment needed to be evaluated to be able to determine its role within a multidisciplinary approach. Cognitive rehabilitation was an important aspect of this multidisciplinary approach insofar as it could improve the quality of life (QoL) of MS people.

Methods

• The physicians included 34 patients in this study.
• They randomly allocated them either to treatment with multidisciplinary rehabilitation plus cognitive training or to treatment with multidisciplinary rehabilitation alone.

Results

• The patients assigned to the rehabilitation plus cognitive training group demonstrated an improvement in the cognitive test of executive function and a marked improvement in quality of life (QoL) after 3 months of cognitive treatment.
• In the physical composite score alone, the patients treated with multidisciplinary rehabilitation without cognitive training improved.
• Though the improvement was confirmed at the 6-month follow-up examination (p = 0.036) only in patients treated with multidisciplinary rehabilitation plus cognitive training, both groups of patients showed an improvement in depression.