Dementia Support Line
Having a cognitive assessment
Learn about cognitive assessments, which have a role in many different types of research, such as trials of new treatments or studies to understand early changes that happen in dementia.
- What’s it like to take part in research?
- Having a MRI scan
- You are here: Having a cognitive assessment
- Having a lumbar puncture
- Having a PET scan
- Having a MEG scan
Cognitive assessments are used to measure thinking abilities such as memory, language, reasoning and perception. This helps to build a picture of someone’s abilities over a range of skills, and allows researchers to monitor how they are changing over time. The simplest tests may just take 5 minutes, and a full cognitive assessment may take half an hour to two hours.
If you are having an assessment as part of your clinical diagnosis, your clinician will normally discuss the results with you. When assessments are done for research often you won’t get feedback as the tests are new and the researchers are only starting to learn what the results could mean.
