Alteration of autobiographical memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

The concept of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) concerns a population of older individuals at high risk of developing probable Alzheimer's disease. Although anterograde memory deficits have been largely documented in patients with aMCI, little is known about the integrity of their autobiographical memory (AuM). This study aimed at evaluating AuM in aMCI individuals and at investigating whether their ability to retrieve AuMs varied as a function of whether the tests used required recognition or effortful retrieval processes.

[Psychological and behavioral disorders with good outcome in neurosarcoidosis].

Introduction: Neurological involvement is observed in 5% of cases of sarcoidosis and includes impairment of the central nervous system, the meninges, and the cranial and peripheral nerves. Besides neurological defects, cognitive impairment may be encountered ranging from isolated memory defect to dementia.

Exegesis: We report a case of neurosarcoidosis occurring in a 40-year-old woman, a native of Reunion Island, with initial meningeal and hypophyseal involvement.

[Characterization of gestural disorders in primary progressive apraxia: diagnostic and nosographic contribution].

Five cases are reported of patients with so-called primary progressive apraxia, defined as a slowly worsening disturbance of gestural abilities, without other major cognitive changes during a long period, in relation to degenerative cortical atrophy. All five cases, as other cases in the literature, share the following common features: 1) asymmetrical onset of upper limb clumsiness, more often involving the left side, later involving the contralateral side and lower limbs; 2) after a variable delay, the occurrence of symptoms suggesting subcortical involvement (akinesia, limb stiffness, various kinds of movement disorders, dystonia, paresis of vertical gaze); 3) diffuse cortical atrophy typically more pronounced in the superior parietal cortex opposite to the first side affected. The unusual nature of apraxia in all these cases is pointed out and referred to as Luria's "kinesthaesic apraxia", ascribed to a loss of "selectivity" of distal elementary movements.

[Transient Korsakoff's syndrome after intraventricular hemorrhage].

A 42 year-old man with intraventricular haemorrhage developed a transient Korsakoff's syndrome. A small arteriovenous malformation was identified on the inner side of the left parietal lobe. Cognitive disorders are very frequent after surgery on anterior communicating artery aneurysms, more rarely when the haemorrhage interest the axial anatomic loci implicating in the process of amnesic syndromes.

[Ambulatory autonomy and visual motion perception in a case of almost total cortical blindness].

A 37-year-old man experienced cortical blindness following a bilateral stroke in the territory of the posterior cerebral arteries. Four years later, the measurement of visual field defects (Goldmann perimeter) showed persistence of bilateral blindness with a 2-degree preservation of macular vision and a perifoveal sparing between 10 to 30 degrees of eccentricity in the left inferior quadrant. Despite this visual impairment, the subject was able to perform visually-guided locomotion.