Forgetting Rates of Prose Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Background: Some authors report steeper slopes of forgetting in early Alzheimer's disease (AD), while others do not. Contrasting findings are thought to be due to methodological inconsistencies or variety of testing methods, yet they also emerge when people are assessed on the same testing procedure.

Objective: We aimed to assess if forgetting slopes of people with mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD) are different from age-matched healthy controls (HC) by using a prose paradigm.

The Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test: Discriminative Values in a Naturalistic Cohort.

Background: Neuropsychological assessment is still the basis for the first evaluation of patients with cognitive complaints. The Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT) generates several indices that could have different accuracy in the differential diagnosis between Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other disorders.

Objective: In a consecutive series of naturalistic patients, the accuracy of the FCSRT indices in differentiating patients with either mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD or AD dementia from other competing conditions was evaluated.

The Role of Hub and Spoke Regions in Theory of Mind in Early Alzheimer's Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia.

Theory of mind (ToM, the ability to attribute mental states to others) deficit is a frequent finding in neurodegenerative conditions, mediated by a diffuse brain network confirmed by 18F-FDG-PET and MR imaging, involving frontal, temporal and parietal areas. However, the role of hubs and spokes network regions in ToM performance, and their respective damage, is still unclear. To study this mechanism, we combined ToM testing with brain 18F-FDG-PET imaging in 25 subjects with mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease (MCI−AD), 24 subjects with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and 40 controls.

Dopaminergic and Serotonergic Degeneration and Cortical [ F]Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography in De Novo Parkinson's Disease.

Background: Degeneration of the nigrostriatal dopaminergic (DA) and the raphe-thalamic serotonergic (SE) systems is among the earliest changes observed in Parkinson's disease (PD). The consequences of those changes on brain metabolism, especially regarding their impact on the cortex, are poorly understood.

Objectives: Using multi-tracer molecular imaging, we assessed in a cohort of drug-naive PD patients the association between cortical metabolism and DA and SE system deafferentation of either striatum or thalamus, and we explored whether this association was mediated by either striatum or thalamus metabolism.

Brain Resources: How Semantic Cueing Works in Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer's Disease (MCI-AD).

Semantic cues in the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCRST) play a key role in the neuropsychological diagnosis of Amnesic Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer's Disease (MCI-AD); however, the neural bases of their impact of recall abilities are only partially understood. Here, we thus decided to investigate the relationships between brain metabolism and the FCSRT Index of Sensitivity of Cueing (ISC) in patients with MCI-AD and in healthy controls (HC). Thirty MCI-AD patients (age: 74.

The role of anterior prefrontal cortex in prospective memory: an exploratory FDG-PET study in early Alzheimer's disease.

From previous studies in healthy volunteers the prefrontal regions are deeply involved in prospective memory (PM), although little is known about the functional neural basis of PM in prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD). To this end, we retrospectively recruited 18 patients with mild cognitive impairment caused by AD and 23 matched healthy control subjects who had undergone F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography and the PM-specific paradigm test. Brain metabolism was correlated with the PM score in the 2 groups separately to find those brain areas correlated with PM performance, which were then used as a hub for an inter-regional metabolic connectivity analyses (inter-regional correlation analysis).

Anatomical and neurochemical bases of theory of mind in de novo Parkinson's Disease.

Theory of mind (ToM) deficit is a frequent finding in subjects with neurological and psychiatric conditions. While a number of brain regions play a role in ToM, to date the contribution of the diffuse projection systems is less understood. Here, we explored the topographical and neurochemical bases of ToM using multi-tracer molecular imaging and quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) in a group of 30 drug-naïve, de novo Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients (mean age 73.

Epilepsy in Neurodegenerative Dementias: A Clinical, Epidemiological, and EEG Study.

Background: Seizures are common in patients with dementia but precise epidemiologic data of epilepsy in neurodegenerative dementia is lacking.

Objective: The first aim of the study was to investigate prevalence and clinical characteristics of epilepsy in a large cohort of patients with neurodegenerative dementias. Subsequently, we explored clinical, neuropsychological, and quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) data of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients with epilepsy (AD-EPI) as compared to AD patients without epilepsy (AD-CTR).