Predicting home discharge after inpatient rehabilitation of stroke patients with aphasia.

The early identification of the discharge setting from Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities is a primary goal in stroke-related research because of its clinical and socio-economic relevance. Several features have been identified as significant predictors of the discharge setting. Within cognitive deficits, aphasia is known to be a common and disabling condition that could influence rehabilitation outcome.

Feasibility and preliminary efficacy of brief tele-psychotherapy for COVID-19 patients and their first-degree relatives.

Background: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic compromised the mental health of COVID-19 patients and their family members. Due to social distancing and lockdown measures, a remote, tele-psychotherapy program for former or current COVID-19 patients and their relatives was implemented.

Objective: The primary goal of this project was to evaluate intervention feasibility.

Psychotherapeutic and Psychiatric Intervention in Patients With COVID-19 and Their Relatives: Protocol for the DigiCOVID Trial.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is negatively impacting the mental health of both patients with COVID-19 and the general population. As current guidelines are limiting in-person contacts to reduce the spread of the virus, the development of a digital approach to implement in psychiatric and psychological consultations is needed. In this paper, we present the DigiCOVID protocol, a digital approach to offer remote, personalized psychological and psychiatric support to former or current patients with COVID-19 and their relatives.

Developing a Brief Tele-Psychotherapy Model for COVID-19 Patients and Their Family Members.

The COVID-19 pandemic is negatively impacting the mental health of COVID-19 patients and family members. Given the restrictions limiting in person contact to reduce the spread of the virus, a digital approach is needed to tackle the psychological aftermath of the pandemic. We present the development of a brief remote psychotherapy program for COVID-19 patients and/or their relatives.

Place4Carers: a multi-method participatory study to co-design, piloting, and transferring a novel psycho-social service for engaging family caregivers in remote rural settings.

Background: Family caregivers are key actors in the ageing society. They are mediators between practitioners and patients and usually provide also essential daily services for the elders. However, till now, few services have been deployed to help caregivers in their care tasks as in improving their mental health which can experience sever burden due to caregiving duties.

Place4Carers: a mixed-method study protocol for engaging family caregivers in meaningful actions for successful ageing in place.

Introduction: Engaging family caregivers could be a critical asset to make the 'ageing-in-place' imperative a reality. This is particularly evident in rural and remote areas, where caregivers can fill the gaps that exist due to the fragmentation of the welfare system. However, there is little knowledge about the expectations that family caregivers have from healthcare services in rural and remote areas.

Interaction Between Recovery of Motor and Language Abilities After Stroke.

Objective: To analyze the nature of the interaction between motor and language recovery in patients with motor impairment and aphasia following left hemispheric stroke and to investigate prognostic factors of best recovery, that is, the significant recovery of both functions simultaneously.

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Setting: Specialized inpatient rehabilitation facility.

Motor recovery in post-stroke patients with aphasia: the role of specific linguistic abilities.

Background: Aphasia is a serious consequence of stroke but aphasics patients have been routinely excluded from participation in some areas of stroke research.

Objective: To assess the role of specific linguistic and non-verbal cognitive abilities on the short-term motor recovery of patients with aphasia due to first-ever stroke to the left hemisphere after an intensive rehabilitation treatment.

Methods: 48 post-acute aphasic patients, who underwent physiotherapy and speech language therapy, were enrolled for this retrospective cohort-study.

Cognitive impairment is a negative short-term and long-term prognostic factor in elderly patients with hip fracture.

Background: Subjects with severe cognitive impairment (CI) have a high-risk of hip fractures with increased rate of adverse postoperative functional outcomes and mortality.

Aim: To evaluate the impact of different degrees of CI on functional recovery and mortality after hip fracture.

Design: Prospective observational study.

General cognition predicts post-stroke recovery defined through minimal clinically important difference (MCID): a cohort study in an Italian rehabilitation clinic.

Background: In the field of rehabilitation it is crucial to define if changes in functional scores correspond to relevant clinical improvements.

Aim: To assess whether cognition affects motor recovery in post-stroke patients using a clinical meaningful criterion: the minimal clinically important difference (MCID).

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Pure associative tactile agnosia for the left hand: clinical and anatomo-functional correlations.

Associative tactile agnosia (TA) is defined as the inability to associate information about object sensory properties derived through tactile modality with previously acquired knowledge about object identity. The impairment is often described after a lesion involving the parietal cortex (Caselli, 1997; Platz, 1996). We report the case of SA, a right-handed 61-year-old man affected by first ever right hemispheric hemorrhagic stroke.

An Italian battery for the assessment of semantic memory disorders.

We report the construction and standardization of a new comprehensive battery of tests for the assessment of semantic memory disorders. The battery is constructed on a common set of 48 stimuli, belonging to both living and non-living categories, rigidly controlled for several confounding variables, and is based on an empirically derived corpus of semantic features. It includes six tasks, in order to assess semantic memory through different modalities of input and output: two naming tasks, one with colored pictures and the other in response to an oral description, a word-picture matching task, a picture sorting task, a free generation of features task and a sentence verification task.

The evolution of alexia in two cases of posterior cortical atrophy.

Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is an uncommon presentation of Alzheimer's disease (AD), characterised by prevalent anatomo-functional involvement of posterior cortical areas. Accordingly, the main clinical features at onset are disorders of high-order visual processing, such as alexia and impairments of visuo-spatial and visuo-constructional abilities. The clinical features in the early stages of disease are variable, and they have been suggested to stem from prevalent ventral or dorsal brain pathology, and/or asymmetric hemispheric involvement.

The logopenic/phonological variant of primary progressive aphasia.

Objective: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is characterized by isolated decline in language functions. Semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia are accepted PPA variants. A "logopenic" variant (LPA) has also been proposed, but its cognitive and anatomic profile is less defined.

The clinical overlap between the corticobasal degeneration syndrome and other diseases of the frontotemporal spectrum: three case reports.

The corticobasal degeneration syndrome has been suggested to be part of a complex of conditions (including the different subtypes of frontotemporal dementia and progressive supranuclear palsy), which reflect a spectrum of pathological substrates. This concept is supported by the frequent clinical overlap that can be observed among patients diagnosed with these conditions. We report three clinical cases, characterized by the overlap of the clinical features of corticobasal degeneration syndrome with, respectively, nonfluent progressive aphasia, progressive supranuclear palsy and semantic dementia.

Universal grammar in the frontotemporal dementia spectrum: evidence of a selective disorder in the corticobasal degeneration syndrome.

Introduction: While sentence comprehension has been reported to be defective in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), it is still unclear if this disorder reflects the presence of syntactic impairment, or may be attributed to other factors, such as executive or working memory dysfunction. In order to assess the status of syntactic knowledge in a group of patients belonging to the FTD spectrum, we investigated their ability to detect violations of Universal Grammar principles in a sentence judgement task.

Methods: The group included four semantic dementia patients (SD), nine frontal variant of FTD patients (FvFTD), 15 progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) patients, and 11 corticobasal degeneration syndrome (CBDS) patients.

The effects of a comprehensive rehabilitation program of Alzheimer's Disease in a hospital setting.

Introduction: The evidence for the clinical effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation in patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is debated. Therefore it is important to collect more evidence about the outcome of non-pharmacological therapy of dementia.

Material And Methods: We report data concerning the rehabilitation of 50 patients with probable AD admitted during a 17-month period in a specialized unit.

Action and object naming in frontotemporal dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy, and corticobasal degeneration.

Action naming has been reported to be disproportionately impaired in comparison to object naming in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). This finding has been attributed to the crucial role of frontal cortex in action naming. The investigation of object and action naming in the different subtypes of FTD, as well as in the related conditions of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and corticobasal degeneration (CBD), may thus contribute to the elucidation of the cerebral correlates of the action-object discrepancy as well as provide clues to the underlying cognitive mechanisms.