Publications by authors named "B J Poletti"

Article Synopsis
  • Poor affect recognition is an early indicator of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and this study used the Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS-A) to assess emotional dysfunction in FTD patients compared to healthy controls.
  • The study involved 139 FTD patients of various subtypes and tested them alongside 116 healthy controls, measuring their Affective Recognition Quotient (ARQ) to evaluate emotional recognition accuracy.
  • Results showed that the CATS-A effectively differentiated between FTD patients and healthy controls with high accuracy (AUC 0.89) and had robust internal reliability, suggesting it's a valuable clinical tool for assessing emotional dysfunction in FTD.
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Background: . The present study aimed at deriving regression-based reliable change indices (RCIs) for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in an Italian cohort of non-demented Parkinson's disease (PD) patients.

Methods: N = 33 consecutive, non-demented PD patients were followed-up at a 5-to-8-month interval (M = 6.

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Objective: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) improves motor outcomes in Parkinson's disease (PD) but may have adverse long-term effects on specific cognitive domains. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between total electrical energy (TEED) delivered by DBS and postoperative changes in verbal fluency.

Methods: Seventeen PD patients undergoing bilateral STN-DBS were assessed with the Alternate Verbal Fluency Battery (AVFB), which includes phonemic (PVF), semantic (SVF), and alternate verbal fluency (AVF) tests, before surgery (T0) and after 6 (T1) and 12 months (T2).

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Background: This study aimed at assessing the clinical utility of the Verbal Fluency Index (VFI) over a classical phonemic verbal fluency test in Italian-speaking amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients.

Methods: N = 343 non-demented ALS patients and N = 226 healthy controls (HCs) were administered the Verbal fluency - S task from the Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural ALS Screen (ECAS). The associations between the number of words produced (NoW), the time to read words aloud (TRW) and the VFI (computed as [(60"-TRW)/NoW]) on one hand and both bulbar/respiratory scores from the ALS Functional Rating Scale - Revised (ALSFRS-R) and the ECAS-Executive on the other were tested.

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Background: This study aimed to assess whether quantitative susceptibility imaging (QSM)-based measures of iron accumulation in the cerebellum predict cognitive and behavioral features in non-demented amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients.

Methods: A total of ALS patients underwent 3-T MRI and a clinical assessment using the ALS Functional Rating Scale-Revised (ALSFRS-R) and the Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural ALS Screen (ECAS). Regression models were applied to each subscale of the cognitive section of the ECAS and the ECAS-Carer Interview to examine the effect of QSM-based measures in white and gray matter (WM; GM) of the cerebellum, separately for right, left, and bilateral cerebellar regions of interest (ROIs).

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