Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS), as one of the most common neurological diseases of the central nervous system, is associated with various cognitive impairments. The purpose of this study was the investigation and comparison of the information processing speed between various clinical subtypes of multiple sclerosis and compared to healthy individuals.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 22 healthy volunteers, 21 relapsing-remitting MS, 8 primary progressive MS, and 21 secondary progressive MS patients were matched by age, gender and level of education with each other and the information processing speed was investigated using designed Deary-Liewald software and were analyzed and compared using analysis of variance (ANOVA).
Results: The results of ANOVA revealed that data processing speed was different at least between two groups (p<0.05). Paired comparison of groups with Tukay HSD post hoc test revealed that there was no significant difference between healthy subjects with relapsing-remitting (p>0.05). Healthy subjects compared to primary progressive and secondary progressive have significant difference (p>0.05). There was no significant difference between other subtypes of multiple sclerosis (p>0.05).
Conclusion: The progressive MS subtypes, specially the secondary progressive subtype, have slower movement information processing compared to healthy subjects and other MS subtypes, and in the comparison of MS subtypes there was no significant difference.