Attention impairment in recently diagnosed multiple sclerosis.

Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience cognitive disorders which can occur early in the course of the disease. The present study tried to investigate attention abilities of MS patients at the early stage of the disease. Three attention modalities (sustained, simple and complex focused attention) were evaluated. The results show that MS patients at the early stage of the disease presented attentional dysfunction only when the cognitive load of the attention task was high and when controlled information processing was required. This suggests that MS patients probably suffer from a processing resources deficit without modification of the attentional mechanisms.