Philadelphia Brief Assessment of Cognition in healthy and clinical Brazilian sample

the philadelphia brief assessment of cognition (pbac) is a neuropsychological screening instrument that assesses five cognitive domains: working memory, visuospatial functioning, language, episodic memory and comportment. the aim is to verify if pbac can properly be used in the brazilian sample. participated in this study: (a) 200 healthy volunteers - 100 young [21.6(2.5) years old] and 100 older adults [70.1(7.3) years old]; >12 years of education; (b) 30 alzheimer's patients (ad) [73.7(5.7) years old], 4-11 years in education. the pbac scores: (a) 95.8(2.6), 90.0(4.4) and (b) 65.0(10.8) were correlated with the mini-mental state examination (mmse) for young 29.1(0.9), older adults 28.3(1.4) and ad 18.4(3.0) groups. a positive correlation between mmse and pbac (r=0.9, p<0.001) was found. negative correlations were observed between pbac domains [memory (-0.63), visuospatial abilities (-0.44) and working memory (-0.3) tasks]. manova showed a better male performance in visuospatial functioning (f=8.5, p=0.004). the brazilian version of pbac proved to be a promising screening instrument for clinical purposes.