Is there any clinical benefit in referring patients with SLE or Sjogren's with cognitive impairment for neuropsychological testing?

I have been grappling with this issue more often in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and more recently in patients with Post-acute COVID Syndrome. In FM and CFS I have not found neuropsychological testing helpful to distinguish true cognitive impairment from the confounding effects of severe persistent pain and fatigue. The literature suggests that it may be difficult to use neuropsychological testing to define either the presence or the extent of PACS.

Neurocognitive tests require a patient or research participant to “perform” or “demonstrate” cognitive skills, such as solving problems, learning and remembering a list of words, or responding to certain targets and not others as fast as possible. These tests have been given to large...

Very thoughtful recommendation by Dr. @Dr. First Last on a difficult and rapidly evolving area. In current practice, there is little value of neuropsychological testing, whether it be in classic autoimmune diseases or centralized pain disorders. However, for research, it is important to perform such testing and sophisticated brain imaging as the field has advanced greatly. It is likely that functional CNS abnormalities overlap in autoimmune diseases and FM, CFS, and post-COVID.