Preface to The Second Edition

The revision of my ‘little red book’, as it has become affectionately known, has taken far longer than I intended. Within a few years of the publication of the first edition it was clear that a revision was required. I had planned to work on it during my sabbatical year (2002) spent in the glorious city of Sydney, but for mysterious reasons other temptations prevented me from getting down to it. The prospect seemed too daunting, as so many new tasks have been introduced into clinical neuropsychology. In addition, I wanted to incorporate a revision of the formalized bedside test developed in Cambridge, the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination (ACE), which has proven so useful in our memory and dementia clinics. By 2004 a revision of the ACE, the ACE-R, was completed which, at last, galvanized me into action. Rather than simply update the book with a few new tests and case vignettes, I have taken the opportunity to radically overhaul the text. In preparing this second edition I have been surprised that the basic principles which guided the first edition still hold up to scrutiny but a lot of changes have been necessary to the content of each chapter. Instead of incorporating delirium and dementia into the first chapter these have been given their own chapter and the whole of the first, theoretical section (Chapters 1–3) has been revised to incorporate new discoveries, ideas, and even a few novel disorders. Chapters 3 and 4 have changed the least but have been updated to reflect my experience of bedside cognitive evaluation over the past decade. The section on standard mental test schedules has been split so that the ACE-R now gets its own chapter (Chapter 7) with a description of uses and limitations together with normative data. The number of illustrative cases has been expanded (Chapter 8) and their description built around the use of the ACE-R in clinical practice. The Appendix required the most revision to reflect the explosion in the number of neuropsychological tests available. I have attempted to describe those in widespread usage but the selection is obviously biased towards tests regularly used in Cambridge.