Numerical Activities of Daily Living (NADL) and Numerical Activities of Daily Living - Financial (NADL-F) in Neurological Diseases

What is the impact of acalculia upon an individual’s everyday life? In clinical practice, a few measures of Activities of Daily Living are available. In these batteries, however, numerical abilities were not distinguished from other abilities. As a consequence, no instrument has been made available so far to measure the nature and the extent of damage to everyday life specifically brought by acalculia in a given individual. The first aim of this series of studies was to build and validate an instrument, the Numerical Activities of Daily Living (NADL), designed to measure this impact. The first section of the thesis describes the psychometric properties of the newly created NADL and the specific profiles observed among patients suffering of several neurological diseases (a specific study was devoted to neurofibromatosis type 1) by using this instrument; patients with a right hemisphere focal lesion were also the object of a specific study). A further development of NADL (NADL-Children) was built for the assessment of numerical activities of daily living in children: it helped to predict math school performance after the first year of primary school. In the second section we deepened one particular aspect of daily living activities requiring numbers (i.e. dealing with finances) found to be critical in our studies employing NADL. Indeed, the loss of financial capacity can have serious legal, economical, and personal consequences on an individual. Therefore, we additionally created a tool (Numerical Activities of Daily Living - Financial; NADL-F) that was also successfully validated in clinical populations in Italy as the second scope of this thesis. We also explored the differences in financial and numerical domains between MCI and healthy controls by means of NADL and NADL-F. The cognitive domains found to be involved in the deficit may be appropriate targets for future intervention studies aimed at preserving functional independence in individuals with MCI. Finally we also correlated the performance in the NADL ...