Apraxia testing to distinguish early Alzheimer's disease from psychiatric causes of cognitive impairment.

Mood- and stress-related disorders commonly cause attentional and memory impairments in middle-aged individuals. In memory testing, these impairments can be mistakenly interpreted as symptoms of dementia; thus, more reliable diagnostic approaches are needed. The present work defines the discriminant accuracy of the Dementia Apraxia Test (DATE) between psychiatric conditions and early-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) on its own and in combination with memory tests.

The dementia apraxia test can detect early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Objective: Limb apraxia is a common early sign of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and is thought to occur specifically in early-onset (before the age of 65) AD. The Dementia Apraxia Test (DATE), a test of limb and face praxis developed to support the differential diagnosis of dementia, has shown good diagnostic accuracy in detecting AD in older patients, but it has not been validated for younger age groups. We investigated how accurately DATE can detect AD in middle-aged individuals and whether apraxia is a distinctive feature in early-onset AD.

Attentional bias towards interpersonal aggression in depression - an eye movement study.

Depressed individuals exhibit an attentional bias towards mood-congruent stimuli, yet evidence for biased processing of threat-related information in human interaction remains scarce. Here, we tested whether an attentional bias towards interpersonally aggressive pictures over interpersonally neutral pictures could be observed to a greater extent in depressed participants than in control participants. Eye movements were recorded while the participants freely viewed visually matched interpersonally aggressive and neutral pictures, which were presented in pairs.