Concurrent validity of a computer-based cognitive screening tool for use in adults with HIV disease.

As the incidence of HIV-associated dementia has decreased, the survival of HIV-infected individuals with milder forms of cognitive impairment has increased. Detecting this milder impairment in its earliest stages has great clinical and research importance. We report here the results of an initial evaluation of the Computer Assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment (CAMCI(®)), a computerized screening tool designed to assess abnormal cognitive decline with reduced respondent and test administrator burden.

Regional grey matter shrinks in hypertensive individuals despite successful lowering of blood pressure.

The aim of the study was to determine whether the reduction in brain grey matter volume associated with hypertension persisted or was remediated among hypertensive patients newly treated over the course of a year. A total of 41 hypertensive patients were assessed over the course of a 1-year successful anti-hypertensive treatment. Brain areas identified previously in cross-sectional studies differing in volume between hypertensive and normotensive individuals were examined with a semi-automated measurement technique (automated labelling pathway).

Altered cerebral blood flow patterns associated with pathologic worry in the elderly.

Background: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is the most prevalent anxiety disorder among the elderly and has high functional and cognitive morbidity. However, late-life GAD is relatively understudied and its functional neuroanatomy is uncharted. Several imaging studies have suggested abnormalities in the cognitive control systems of emotion regulation in anxiety disorders in young adults.

Validation of consensus panel diagnosis in dementia.

Background: The clinical diagnosis of dementing diseases largely depends on the subjective interpretation of patient symptoms. Consensus panels are frequently used in research to determine diagnoses when definitive pathologic findings are unavailable. Nevertheless, research on group decision making indicates that many factors can adversely affect panel performance.

Temporoparietal hypometabolism in frontotemporal lobar degeneration and associated imaging diagnostic errors.

Objective: To evaluate the cause of diagnostic errors in the visual interpretation of positron emission tomographic scans with fludeoxyglucose F 18 (FDG-PET) in patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and patients with Alzheimer disease (AD).

Design: Twelve trained raters unaware of clinical and autopsy information independently reviewed FDG-PET scans and provided their diagnostic impression and confidence of either FTLD or AD. Six of these raters also recorded whether metabolism appeared normal or abnormal in 5 predefined brain regions in each hemisphere-frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, anterior temporal cortex, temporoparietal cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex.

Caudate asymmetry: a neurobiological marker of moderate prenatal alcohol exposure in young adults.

This study identified structural changes in the caudate nucleus in offspring of mothers who drank moderate levels of alcohol during pregnancy. In addition, the effect of duration of alcohol use during pregnancy was assessed. Young adults were recruited from the Maternal Health Practices and Child Development Project.

Differences in brain structure and function in older adults with self-reported disabling and nondisabling chronic low back pain.

Objective: The primary aim of this pilot study was to identify structural and functional brain differences in older adults with self-reported disabling chronic low back pain (CLBP) compared with those who reported nondisabling CLBP.

Design: Cross-sectional.

Participants: Sixteen cognitively intact older adults, eight with disabling CLBP and eight with nondisabling CLBP.

Psychomotor speed and functional brain MRI 2 years after completing a physical activity treatment.

Background: Short-term adherence to physical activity (PA) in older adults improves psychomotor processing abilities and is associated with greater brain activation. It is not known whether these associations are also significant for longer-term adherence to moderate-intensity activities.

Methods: We measured the cross-sectional association of regular walking with brain activation while performing the digit symbol substitution test (DSST).

Brain activity during bladder filling is related to white matter structural changes in older women with urinary incontinence.

Evidence from longitudinal studies in community-dwelling elderly links complaints of urgency and urinary incontinence with structural white matter changes known as white matter hyperintensities (WMH). How WMH might lead to incontinence remains unknown, since information about how they relate to neural circuits involved in continence control is lacking. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of WMH in altered brain activity in older women with urgency incontinence.

A medial temporal lobe division of labor: insights from memory in aging and early Alzheimer disease.

Dual process theories of recognition memory posit that recollection and familiarity represent dissociable processes. Animal studies and human functional imaging experiments support an anatomic dissociation of these processes in the medial temporal lobes (MTL). By this hypothesis, recollection may be dependent on the hippocampus, while familiarity appears to rely on extrahippocampal MTL (ehMTL) structures, particularly perirhinal and lateral entorhinal cortices.

Amygdala reactivity is inversely related to level of cannabis use in individuals with comorbid cannabis dependence and major depression.

Phan et al. (2008) recently reported that an acute dose of oral THC is associated with a decrease in threat-related amygdala reactivity during a social threat stimulus task. However, to date, those findings have not been replicated, and have not been extended to clinical studies involving smoked rather than oral cannabis.

Basal cerebral metabolism may modulate the cognitive effects of Abeta in mild cognitive impairment: an example of brain reserve.

Inverse correlations between amyloid-beta (Abeta) load measured by Pittsburgh Compound-B (PiB) positron emission tomography (PET) and cerebral metabolism using [(18)F]fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose (FDG) in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, suggest local Abeta-induced metabolic insults. However, this relationship has not been well studied in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or amyloid-positive controls. Here, we explored associations of Abeta deposition with metabolism via both region-of-interest-based and voxel-based analyses in amyloid-positive control subjects and patients with MCI or AD.

Executive control function, brain activation and white matter hyperintensities in older adults.

Context: Older adults responding to executive control function (ECF) tasks show greater brain activation on functional MRI (fMRI). It is not clear whether greater fMRI activation indicates a strategy to compensate for underlying brain structural abnormalities while maintaining higher performance.

Objective: To identify the patterns of fMRI activation in relationship with ECF performance and with brain structural abnormalities.

Multivariate tensor-based morphometry on surfaces: application to mapping ventricular abnormalities in HIV/AIDS.

Here we developed a new method, called multivariate tensor-based surface morphometry (TBM), and applied it to study lateral ventricular surface differences associated with HIV/AIDS. Using concepts from differential geometry and the theory of differential forms, we created mathematical structures known as holomorphic one-forms, to obtain an efficient and accurate conformal parameterization of the lateral ventricular surfaces in the brain. The new meshing approach also provides a natural way to register anatomical surfaces across subjects, and improves on prior methods as it handles surfaces that branch and join at complex 3D junctions.

fMRI activation in late-life anxious depression: a potential biomarker.

Objective And Methods: The neurobiology of late-life anxious depression (LLAD) is poorly characterized despite evidence that this is a common and severe subtype of late-life depression. To identify the neuroanatomical substrate of LLAD, we examined event-related fMRI data collected in eight subjects with late-life depression, half of whom had high levels of comorbid anxiety. Subjects were trained on the Preparing to Overcome Prepotency (POP) task, which is an executive control task that reliably activates the lateral prefrontal cortex-anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) cognitive control circuit.

Gain in adiposity across 15 years is associated with reduced gray matter volume in healthy women.

Objective: To test whether current gray matter volume (GMV) covaried with previously obtained longitudinal measures of weight gain-as assessed by increases in body mass index (BMI)-among otherwise healthy postmenopausal women. Cross-sectional results indicate that reduced GMV may be associated with excess body weight.

Methods: Demographic, biometric, and behavioral measures were obtained from 48 women as part of the Pittsburgh Healthy Women Study, a longitudinal epidemiological investigation initiated between 1983 and 1984.

Amyloid imaging in mild cognitive impairment subtypes.

Objective: We utilized the amyloid imaging ligand Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB) to determine the presence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology in different mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subtypes and to relate increased PiB binding to other markers of early AD and longitudinal outcome.

Methods: Twenty-six patients with MCI (13 single-domain amnestic-MCI [a-MCI], 6 multidomain a-MCI, and 7 nonamnestic MCI) underwent PiB imaging. Twenty-three had clinical follow-up (21.

Altered striatal response to reward in bulimia nervosa after recovery.

Objective: It is possible that disturbances of systems modulating reward may contribute to a vulnerability to develop an eating disorder.

Method: This hypothesis was tested by assessing functional magnetic resonance brain imaging response to a monetary reward task known to activate the anterior ventral striatum (AVS), a region implicated in motivational aspects toward stimuli. To avoid the confounding effects of malnutrition, 10 women who had recovered from bulimia nervosa (BN) were compared with 10 healthy comparison women (CW).

Fibrillar amyloid-beta burden in cognitively normal people at 3 levels of genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease.

Fibrillar amyloid-beta (Abeta) is found in the brains of many cognitively normal older people. Whether or not this reflects a predisposition to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is unknown. We used Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB) PET to characterize the relationship between fibrillar Abeta burden and this predisposition in cognitively normal older people at 3 mean levels of genetic risk for AD.

Patterns of mild cognitive impairment after treatment of depression in the elderly.

Objectives: Late-life depression (LLD) is associated with persistent cognitive impairment in a subset of individuals. The purpose of this study was to 1) examine the frequency and characteristics of cognitive diagnoses (Mild Cognitive Impairment [MCI], dementia) among remitted elderly depressed subjects and 2) to compare the prevalence rate and correlates of cognitive diagnoses with those of comparison subjects.

Design: Crosssectional.

Special article: gait measures indicate underlying focal gray matter atrophy in the brain of older adults.

Objective: Our objective was to identify the spatial distribution of focal atrophy within mobility-related brain regions in relationship with quantitative gait characteristics.

Methods: Gray matter volume was obtained from 220 older adults (78.0 years old, 63% women, 77% white) for brain regions of five domains: motor (motor, sensorimotor and supplementary areas, basal ganglia, cerebellum), visuospatial attention (inferior and superior posterior parietal lobules), cognitive processing speed/executive control function (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), memory (hippocampus), and motor imagery (parahippocampus, posterior cingulated cortex) domains.

Amygdalae morphometry in late-life depression.

Objective: The amygdalae have been a focus of mood disorder research due to their key role in processing emotional information. It has been long known that depressed individuals demonstrate impaired functional performance while engaged in emotional tasks. The structural basis for these functional differences has been investigated via volumetric analysis with mixed findings.

Conflict-related activity in the caudal anterior cingulate cortex in the absence of awareness.

The caudal anterior cingulate cortex (cACC) is thought to be involved in performance monitoring, as conflict and error-related activity frequently co-localize in this area. Recent results suggest that these effects may be differentially modulated by awareness. To clarify the role of awareness in performance monitoring by the cACC, we used rapid event-related fMRI to examine the cACC activity while subjects performed a dual task: a delayed recognition task and a serial response task (SRT) with an implicit probabilistic learning rule (i.

Altered functioning of the executive control circuit in late-life depression: episodic and persistent phenomena.

Objective: To characterize the functional neuroanatomy of late-life depression (LLD) by probing for both episodic and persistent alterations in the executive-control circuit of elderly adults.

Design: Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected while participants performed an executive-control task.

Setting: Participants were recruited through a depression-treatment study within the Pittsburgh, PA, Intervention Research Center for Late-Life Mood Disorders.

Frequent amyloid deposition without significant cognitive impairment among the elderly.

Objective: To characterize the prevalence of amyloid deposition in a clinically unimpaired elderly population, as assessed by Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB) positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, and its relationship to cognitive function, measured with a battery of neuropsychological tests.

Design: Subjects underwent cognitive testing and PiB PET imaging (15 mCi for 90 minutes with an ECAT HR+ scanner). Logan graphical analysis was applied to estimate regional PiB retention distribution volume, normalized to a cerebellar reference region volume, to yield distribution volume ratios (DVRs).