Assessment of neuropsychological dysfunction in the workplace: normative data from the Pittsburgh Occupational Exposures Test Battery

Abstract

Neuropsychologists are being increasingly called upon to assess the neurobehavioral status of adults who have been exposed to toxic chemicals or heavy metals in the workplace. Unfortunately, the evaluation of blue-collar workers has been hampered by the absence of a brief yet comprehensive battery of sensitive neuropsychological tests that have been administered to a large cohort of demographically similar adults with no prior history of occupational exposure. In this paper we describe the development of the Pittsburgh Occupational Exposures Test Battery. We detail the procedures used to collect appropriate age-scaled norms from 182 blue-collar males, and delineate the factor structure of the test battery. We also examine the interrelationships among test scores and certain demographic variables, and discuss the epidemiologic and clinical relevance of these data.