Explainable machine learning on clinical features to predict and differentiate Alzheimer's progression by sex: Toward a clinician-tailored web interface.

Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common neurodegenerative disorder world-wide, presents sex-specific differences in its manifestation and progression, necessitating personalized diagnostic approaches. Current procedures are often costly and invasive, lacking consideration of sex-based differences. This study introduces an explainable machine learning (ML) system to predict and differentiate the progression of AD based on sex, using non-invasive, easily collectible predictors such as neuropsychological test scores and sociodemographic data, enabling its application in every day clinical settings.

Dopaminergic Treatment and Episodic Memory in Parkinson's Disease: A Meta-analysis of the Literature.

To date, few studies have focused on the benefits of dopaminergic treatment on episodic memory functions in patients affected by Parkinson's disease (PD). We conducted a meta-analysis to determine the effects of pharmacological therapy with dopamine in alleviating episodic memory deficits in Parkinson's patients. A secondary aim was to evaluate the role of dopamine in episodic memory circuits and thus in different memory systems.

Could Accelerated Long-Term Forgetting Be a Feature of the Higher Rate of Memory Complaints Associated with Subjective Cognitive Decline? An Exploratory Study.

Background: Recently, subjective cognitive decline (SCD) was proposed as an early risk factor for future Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Objective: In this study, we investigated whether accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF), assessed with extended testing intervals than those adopted in clinical practice, might be a cognitive feature of SCD. Using an explorative MRI analysis of the SCD sample, we attempted to investigate the areas most likely involved in the ALF pattern.

Exploring the neural and behavioral correlates of cognitive telerehabilitation in mild cognitive impairment with three distinct approaches.

Background: Currently, the impact of drug therapies on neurodegenerative conditions is limited. Therefore, there is a strong clinical interest in non-pharmacological interventions aimed at preserving functionality, delaying disease progression, reducing disability, and improving quality of life for both patients and their caregivers. This longitudinal multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) applies three innovative cognitive telerehabilitation (TR) methods to evaluate their impact on brain functional connectivity reconfigurations and on the overall level of cognitive and everyday functions.

The Role of the Anterior Thalamic Nuclei in the Genesis of Memory Disorders in Alzheimer's Disease: An Exploratory Study.

Background: Increasing evidence is demonstrating that degeneration of specific thalamic nuclei, in addition to the hippocampus, may occur in Alzheimer's disease (AD) from the prodromal stage (mild cognitive impairment - MCI) and contribute to memory impairment.

Objective: Here, we evaluated the presence of macro and micro structural alterations at the level of the anterior thalamic nuclei (ATN) and medio-dorsal thalamic nuclei (MDTN) in AD and amnestic MCI (aMCI) and the possible relationship between such changes and the severity of memory impairment.

Methods: For this purpose, a sample of 50 patients with aMCI, 50 with AD, and 50 age- and education-matched healthy controls (HC) were submitted to a 3-T MRI protocol with whole-brain T1-weighted and diffusion tensor imaging and a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment.

The effectiveness of an immersive virtual reality and telemedicine-based cognitive intervention on prospective memory in Parkinson's disease patients with mild cognitive impairment and healthy aged individuals: design and preliminary baseline results of a placebo-controlled study.

Introduction: Prospective memory (PM) impairments have been extensively documented in individuals with Parkinson's disease associated with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) and in those with healthy aging. Considering how PM failure decreases individuals' quality of life and functional independence in the activities of daily living, training to enhance this ability could be a prior target of intervention.

Objective: Here, we aimed to present the study protocol and preliminary results of a novel immersive virtual reality (IVR) and telemedicine-based (TM) cognitive intervention focused on executive abilities (i.

Special issue on "Novel neuropsychological instruments for the prodromal and preclinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease".

Dementia is one of the most challenging health and social emergencies today. It affects more than 55 million people worldwide with epidemiological projections of reaching 140 million people in 2050. Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), the clinical-pathological entity responsible for 60%-70% of all dementia cases, rests currently on the demonstration of cerebrospinal fluid or neuroimaging biomarkers, as a proxy of AD cortical neuropathology.

Exploring mechanisms that affect retrograde memory for public events in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: A longitudinal update.

Here, we examined mechanisms that affect retrograde memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI) as a function of longitudinal clinical outcome. 8 a-MCI who converted to Alzheimer's dementia (AD) during the subsequent 3-year follow-up (converter a-MCI) and 10 a-MCI who remained clinically stable during the same period (stable a-MCI) were compared at the baseline evaluation (i.e.

Forgetting rate for the familiarity and recollection components of recognition in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: A longitudinal study.

Here we aimed to investigate the rate of forgetting of the familiarity and recollection components of recognition in patients at the onset of medial temporal lobe (MTL) pathology and destined to convert to Alzheimer's disease (AD). For this purpose, we conducted a longitudinal study of 13 patients who were diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI) at the first assessment and followed-up for 3 years. During this time, five patients converted to AD and eight remained in a stable condition of cognitive impairment.

The diagnostic usefulness of experimental memory tasks for detecting subjective cognitive decline: Preliminary results in an Italian sample.

Objective: Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) was recently proposed as an early risk factor for future mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we investigated the sensitivity of novel neuropsychological testing paradigms (which have been proposed as potentially challenging tools for the identification of preclinical AD) in capturing the subtle cognitive changes leading to SCD but not objectively detected by traditional tests.

Method: The performances of 18 patients with SCD and 15 healthy individuals with no worries of cognitive decline (healthy controls [HC]) was compared on demanding tasks that investigated, respectively, associative memory, memory binding, spatial pattern separation processes and semantic memory.

The temporal lobes and memory.

Since the first description of the case of H.M. in the mid-1950s, the debate over the contribution of the mesial temporal lobe (MTL) to human memory functioning has not ceased to stimulate new experimental work and the development of new theoretical models.

Accelerated long-term forgetting in neurodegenerative disorders: A systematic review of the literature.

Accelerated Long-term Forgetting (ALF) is a memory deficit characterised by normal retention up to relatively short intervals (e.g., minutes, hours) with increased forgetting over longer periods (e.

The dopaminergic system supports flexible and rewarding dyadic motor interactive behaviour in Parkinson's Disease.

Studies indicate that the dopaminergic system (DAS) supports individual flexible behaviour. While flexibility is quintessential to effective dyadic motor interactions, whether DAS mediates adaptations of one's own motor behaviour to that of a partner is not known. Here, we asked patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) to synchronize their grasping movements with those of a virtual partner in conditions that did (Interactive) or did not (Cued) require to predict and adapt to its actions.

Subjective clustering in patients with fronto-temporal dementia.

In the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) memory deficits have been traditionally considered as due to difficulties in encoding/retrieval frontal strategies. However, the frontal origin of memory deficits in bvFTD has been questioned and hippocampal dysfunction has been also proposed. Here we analyzed bvFTD patients' proficiency in subjectively organizing memories without an external criterion.

The Free Association Task: Proposal of a Clinical Tool for Detecting Differential Profiles of Semantic Impairment in Semantic Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease.

: It is widely agreed that patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and patients suffering from semantic dementia (SD) might fail clinically administered semantic tasks due to a different combination of underlying cognitive deficits: namely, degraded semantic representations in SD and degraded representations plus executive control deficit in AD. However, no easy administrable test or test battery for differentiating the semantic impairment profile in these populations has been devised yet. : In this study, we propose a new easy administrable task based on a free association procedure (F-Assoc) to be used in conjunction with category fluency (Cat-Fl) and letter fluency (Lett-Fl) for quantifying pure representational and pure control deficits, thus teasing apart the semantic profile of SD and AD patients.

Implicit prototype learning in patients with memory deficit: Evidence from a study with Alzheimer's disease patients.

Objective: In a previous study (Zannino et al., 2012), it was demonstrated that individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were unimpaired on a new prototype learning task consisting of morphed faces (face prototype learning task [FPLT]). This paradigm was devised to improve on the classical dot pattern task by ruling out any reliance on residual episodic memory or working memory resources.

Articulatory suppression delays processing of abstract words: The role of inner speech.

Compared to concrete concepts, like "book," abstract concepts expressed by words like "justice" are more detached from sensorial experiences, even though they are also grounded in sensorial modalities. Abstract concepts lack a single object as referent and are characterised by higher variability both within and across participants. According to the Word as Social Tool (WAT) proposal, owing to their complexity, abstract concepts need to be processed with the help of inner language.

Memory for public events in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: The role of hippocampus and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex.

Background: Current theories assume that retrograde memory deficits for semantic information in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) are temporally graded and partially sparing most remote memories. Moreover, these models assume a prevalent role of the hippocampus in early phases of memory consolidation and of the prefrontal mesial neocortical areas in permanent consolidation of traces.

Purpose: To explore the relationship between hippocampus and memory accuracy for the most recent public events and between the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and memory accuracy irrespective of the memory age, we investigated in aMCI patients the retrograde memory for public events and its relationship with grey matter volume reductions in the hippocampus and vmPFC.

Subjective organization in the episodic memory of individuals with Parkinson's disease associated with mild cognitive impairment.

Word clustering (i.e., the ability to reproduce the same word pairs in consecutive recall trials of an unrelated word list) has been extensively investigated as a proxy of subjective organization (SO) of memorandum.

Event-Based Prospective Memory Deficit in Children with ADHD: Underlying Cognitive Factors and Association with Symptoms.

Event-based prospective memory (PM) was investigated in children with Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), using a novel experimental procedure to evaluate the role of working memory (WM) load, attentional focus, and reward sensitivity. The study included 24 children with ADHD and 23 typically-developing controls. The experimental paradigm comprised one baseline condition (BC), only including an ongoing task, and four PM conditions, varying for targets: 1 Target (1T), 4 Targets (4T), Unfocal (UN), and Reward (RE).

Verbal and spatial memory spans in mild cognitive impairment.

Objectives: Working memory (WM) for verbal and visual material may be affected early in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Verbal and visuospatial span tasks, that is neuropsychological procedures commonly used for the clinical assessment of WM, have been scarcely investigated in these patients. Therefore, this study was aimed at evaluating whether performance on tests of verbal and visual-spatial span (which rely to different extents on distinct components of the WM system) is differently sensitive to the presence of MCI and, in particular, of a preclinical AD condition in patients with MCI.

Recognition Memory in Noonan Syndrome.

Noonan syndrome (NS) and the clinically related NS with multiple lentiginous (NMLS) are genetic conditions characterized by upregulated RAS mitogen activated protein kinase (RAS-MAPK) signaling, which is known to impact hippocampus-dependent memory formation and consolidation. The aim of the present study was to provide a detailed characterization of the recognition memory of children and adolescents with NS/NMLS. We compared 18 children and adolescents affected by NS and NMLS with 22 typically developing (TD) children, matched for chronological age and non-verbal Intelligence Quotient (IQ), in two different experimental paradigms, to assess familiarity and recollection: a Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP) and a Task Dissociation Procedure (TDP).

Visuo-verbal distinction revisited: new insights from a study on temporal lobe epilepsy patients in the debate over the lateralization of material-specific and process-specific aspects of memory.

: The automatic interaction between a cue and a memory trace can give rise to the vivid recollection of a purely sensory past experience. But are humans able to reach back intentionally to purely sensory experiences in the absence of any exogenous or endogenous cue? In the present study, we propose an alternative hypothesis, claiming that the retrieval of associated semantic memories, stored in the left hemisphere and acting as endogenous cues, is a prerequisite for intentionally recollecting sensory experience stored in the right hemisphere during mental time travels (MTT). : To investigate this issue, we administered an MTT task to 26 epileptic patients (16 males and 10 females) who had undergone right or left temporal lobectomy and to 28 age and education matched controls.

Does Cue Focality Modulate Age-related Performance in Prospective Memory? An fMRI Investigation.

How prospective memory (PM) weakens with increasing age has been largely debated. We hypothesized that automatic and strategic PM processes, respectively mediated by focal and non-focal cues, are differently affected by aging, even starting from 50-60 years of age. We investigated this issue using a 2 × 2 design in which focal and non-focal experimental conditions were created by varying the conjoint nature of the ongoing task (lexical decision vs.