Neuropsychology
Injuries and medical conditions can affect your memory, behavior and how well you perform mental tasks. When that happens, your doctor turns to a neuropsychologist – an expert on how the brain and behavior are connected – to pinpoint what’s wrong and help you get better.
Atrium Health Carolinas Rehabilitation is home to some of the nation’s top neuropsychologists and we see patients from across the region. Our experts perform a detailed evaluation of your brain and behavior. This helps your doctors match you with treatments that help improve your mental skills and engage in activities you enjoy.
Patient Care – What to Expect
Our program has more neuropsychologists than any other center in the Charlotte area. We also have the largest number of neuropsychologists who are certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology. This gives us unique experience and expertise in evaluating conditions that affect your brain and behavior. We offer:
- Care for all ages, including preschoolers, senior citizens and everyone in between.
- A concussion clinic providing rapid, expert assessment of patients with concussion injuries, including local professional football players.
- A dementia clinic for evaluating cognitive issues that may be related to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia.
- Special testing before and after surgery to make sure patients with conditions like epilepsy, brain tumors and Parkinson’s disease don’t risk neuropsychological damage as a result of their operations. We can also see patients after surgery, to see if they’ve had changes in brain function.
- Support for cancer patients. Two of our neuropsychologists work within Atrium Health Levine Cancer. They help surgeons plan operations that remove the tumor, but don’t harm surrounding tissue (which could lead to neuropsychological problems). We also support cancer patients and survivors as they navigate side effects of treatments like chemotherapy that can harm your brain.
- Research and clinical trials to unlock new ways of treating Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and other conditions.
What We Treat
Injury, disease, medical procedures and surgeries can affect your brain. Neuropsychologists evaluate people who have brain and behavioral issues linked to:
- Traumatic brain injury and other injuries affecting the nervous system
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)
- Cancer and brain tumors
- Problems with memory or thinking that can happen after chemotherapy treatment (chemo brain)
- Central nervous system infection
- Cognitive problems following surgery
- Concussion
- Dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, temporal dementia
- Epilepsy
- Huntington’s disease
- Medical conditions such as lupus and kidney disease
- Movement disorders
- Multiple sclerosis
- Organ transplants and other medical procedures
- Stroke
Neuropsychology Evaluations
If you have one of the conditions listed above, your doctor may refer you to us for a neuropsychological evaluation. We get referrals from all kinds of doctors including brain specialists, surgeons and psychiatrists. These referrals come from many hospitals and healthcare organizations, not just Atrium Health. We do evaluations for 3 types of patients:
- Outpatient evaluations help us diagnose your specific challenges and recommend the right treatment. Since our focus is on testing, we refer most patients for treatment with other providers in the community.
- Inpatient evaluations assess whether someone staying at the hospital has the mental capacity to make decisions about their medical care, such as consenting to a procedure.
- Surgery evaluations help surgeons plan their operations by identifying which parts of the patient’s brain are healthy and which are impaired. They also reveal whether a scheduled surgery poses any neuropsychological risk to a patient. We can also do evaluations after a surgery, to evaluate your brain function after surgery.
Outpatient Neuropsychology Evaluation – What We Test
Our outpatient evaluations gauge your ability to process and recall information. We use several different testing methods, including puzzles, flash cards and interview questions. After your evaluation, a team member will explain your test results and what they mean about your condition and treatment.
Evaluations may last 3 or more hours. They assess things like:
- Academic/school skills
- Attention and concentration
- Emotional or personality functioning
- Executive functions (planning, organization, multitasking)
- IQ (intellectual quotient)
- Language
- Learning and memory
- Perceptual and motor skills
- Problem solving
- Processing speed
- Visual-spatial skills