Demographic effects on the Trail Making Test in hallucinogen abusers.

Demographic effects on the Trail Making test (TMT), a test often used for screening for cognitive impairment, were reexamined in a sample of hallucinogen abusers in drug abuse treatment programs. A sample was drawn from electronic files of data from the Drug Abuse Treatment outcome Study (DATOS). The DATOS was a naturalistic, prospective cohort study that collected data from 1991-1993 in 96 programs in 11 cities in the United States. The number of hallucinogen abusers' scores available for analysis were 128. Data were analyzed to determine the effects of sex, ethnicity, age and education variables on the two parts of the TMT in this large treatment sample of hallucinogen abusers. The variable of ethnicity was statistically significant for both parts A and B of the TMT and just at the edge of significance for age for part A. R-Square values for overall models were moderate (A = .30, B = .29) suggesting that demographic effects on the TMT account for a minority of overall variance in terms of hallucinogen abusers' TMT performance.