A novel digital approach for post-stroke cognitive deficits: a pilot study.

Background: Cognitive dysfunctions after a brain stroke have a huge impact on patients' disability and activities of daily living. Prism adaptation (PA) is currently used in patients with right brain damage to improve lateralized spatial attentional deficits. Recent findings suggest that PA could also be useful for rehabilitation of other cognitive functions.

Efficacy of recreational and occupational activities associated to psychologic support in mild to moderate Alzheimer disease: a multicenter controlled study.

We evaluated the efficacy of a stimulation program mainly based on recreational and occupational activities, associated with a brief cycle of support psychotherapy for patients and caregivers, in mild to moderate Alzheimer Disease (AD) associated or not with cerebrovascular lesions. Sixty-seven patients and 31 controls from 2 Italian towns entered the study. The control group was comprised of AD subjects who voluntarily declined to participate in the program for practical reasons.

Association of estrogen receptor alpha gene with Alzheimer's disease: a case-control study.

Recent experimental data have offered the biological background to study the estrogen receptor (ER) alpha gene as a candidate gene for AD. Genetic association studies proposed ERalpha PvuII and XbaI gene polymorphisms as susceptibility factors for AD, although subsequent studies did not replicate this finding. To verify this association in a Caucasian Italian sample, we conducted a case-control study in a dataset of 172 clinic-based probable AD cases and 172 age- and sex-matched controls.

Specific impairments of selective attention in mild Alzheimer's disease.

The aim of the present study was to evaluate selective visual attention in subjects affected by Alzheimer's Disease (AD), by means of a computerized spatial exploration test that adopts a Touch Screen (TS) interface, which has already proved able to characterize alternative strategies in performing search tasks. We assessed a group of 16 patients affected by mild to moderate AD, comparing them with 16 control subjects matched for age and education. In the experimental tasks the performance of the AD patients was worse than that of the normal elderly, both quantitatively (slower speeds) and qualitatively (poorer planning and higher number of omissions and perseverations).

The heterogeneity of category-specific semantic disorders: evidence from a new case.

We report a new case of category-specific semantic impairment, affecting living entities, in a patient with traumatic brain damage. In the present investigation we attempted to replicate as closely as possible the testing procedures which have been developed by Caramazza and Shelton (1998) to evaluate EW, a patient with a selective semantic disorder for the animal category. The results in our patient indicated a different performance profile, characterised by a more extensive semantic disorder for living entities, and by a more severe loss of specific visual rather than functional knowledge.

Frontal impairment and confabulation after herpes simplex encephalitis: A case report.

We describe the rehabilitation training of a 53-year-old woman with severe confabulatory and dysexecutive syndrome, as well as memory impairment, after herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE). Secondary narcolepsy was also present. Neuropsychologic deficits were detailed through an extensive examination, and specific techniques were used to improve performances in each defective cognitive domain.