Publications by authors named "I Appollonio"

Article Synopsis
  • Poor affect recognition is an early indicator of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and this study used the Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS-A) to assess emotional dysfunction in FTD patients compared to healthy controls.
  • The study involved 139 FTD patients of various subtypes and tested them alongside 116 healthy controls, measuring their Affective Recognition Quotient (ARQ) to evaluate emotional recognition accuracy.
  • Results showed that the CATS-A effectively differentiated between FTD patients and healthy controls with high accuracy (AUC 0.89) and had robust internal reliability, suggesting it's a valuable clinical tool for assessing emotional dysfunction in FTD.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study focused on predicting the spread of pathology in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) to improve early diagnosis and intervention, utilizing the Network Diffusion Model (NDM) to analyze brain atrophy in patients.
  • Researchers examined various FTD subtypes, finding four main epicenters of atrophy, with significant correlations between NDM predictions and actual longitudinal changes observed in patients over 24 months.
  • Results highlighted the progression patterns of different FTD variants, with notable early involvement in specific brain regions and varying effects on atrophy depending on the subtype, particularly in semantic-variant PPA and semantic behavioral variant FTD.
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Surface dyslexia and dysgraphia are considered diagnostic features of semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and are useful signs in English, a language whose attributes afford numerous opportunities to observe these phenomena. This, however, is not the case in many languages, including Italian, that have high transparency between orthography and phonology, making surface reading and spelling errors scarce. This creates a problem in applying the diagnostic recommendations for svPPA in such languages.

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The behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are a heterogeneous set of challenging disturbances of behavior, mood, perception, and thought that occur in almost all patients with dementia. A huge number of instruments have been developed to assess BPSD in different populations and settings. Although some of these tools are more widely used than others, no single instrument can be considered completely satisfactory, and each of these tools has its advantages and disadvantages.

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Unlabelled: Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD) are a heterogeneous set of psychological and behavioral abnormalities seen in persons with dementia (PwD), significantly impacting their quality of life and that of their caregivers. Current assessment tools, such as the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI), are limited by recall bias and lack of direct observation. This study aims to overcome this limitation by making caregiver reports more objective through the use of a novel instrument, referred to as the BPSDiary.

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