Emotional Loneliness Is Related to Objective Cognitive Function in Older People With HIV in the Washington-Baltimore Area: A Cross-sectional Study.

Loneliness confers a significant risk to numerous health outcomes, including cognitive impairment. This study assessed the relationship between loneliness subtypes (social and emotional) and cognition in older people with HIV (OPWH ≥ 50 years). Forty-two participants (STET = 61.

Distinguishing logopenic from semantic & nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia: Patterns of linguistic and behavioral correlations.

While language characteristics of logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) are well-defined, behavioral characteristics are less understood. We investigated correlations between language and behavioral scores across three variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and found language performance and behavioral disturbances are correlated in lvPPA, but not other PPA subtypes. Results suggest that unlike other PPA variants, patients diagnosed with lvPPA do not develop negative behaviors until language deficits are severe.

Stealing Cookies in the Twenty-First Century: Measures of Spoken Narrative in Healthy Versus Speakers With Aphasia.

Purpose Our goal was to evaluate an updated version of the "Cookie Theft" picture by obtaining norms based on picture descriptions by healthy controls for total content units (CUs), syllables per CU, and the ratio of left-right CUs. In addition, we aimed to compare these measures from healthy controls to picture descriptions obtained from individuals with poststroke aphasia and primary progressive aphasia (PPA) to assess whether these measures can capture impairments in content and efficiency of communication. Method Using an updated version of this picture, we analyzed descriptions from 50 healthy controls to develop norms for numbers of syllables, total CUs, syllables per CU, and left-right CU.

Differentiating between subtypes of primary progressive aphasia and mild cognitive impairment on a modified version of the Frontal Behavioral Inventory.

Behavioral assessment has been investigated in frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer's disease, but has not been explored extensively in subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). We explored the ability of a modified version of the Frontal Behavioral Inventory (FBI-mod) to discriminate between patients with distinct subtypes of PPA and patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We hypothesized that individuals with nonfluent agrammatic PPA (nfaPPA) would have higher negative behavior scores than other groups and that individuals with semantic variant PPA (svPPA) would have higher disinhibition scores than other groups.

Stroke of bad luck?

We hypothesized that distinct acute right hemisphere lesions disrupt separate components of valuation and emotional response to winning and losing money and of emotional empathy in observing a partner win or lose money. We measured skin conductance response (SCR) and ratings of emotions when acute right hemisphere stroke patients or healthy controls won or lost money in roulette, or when they watched a partner win or lose. Our results showed that percentage of damage after stroke to right anterior insula and frontal operculum negatively correlated with both SCR to winning and losing and difference between rating wins versus losses.