Background: Many outcome measures used in AD clinical trials require clinic visits and are paper based, making them infrequent and burdensome 'snapshots', subject to rater bias. A consortium of 10 pharma companies came together with Cumulus Neuroscience to design a solution for frequent, objective, real-world measurement across a range of domains. We present a study that examined the feasibility of asking patients with mild dementia to use the neuroassessment platform repeatedly at home for one year.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Current tools for Alzheimer's disease screening and staging used in clinical research (e.g. ACE-3, ADAS-Cog) require substantial face-to-face time with trained professionals, and may be affected by subjectivity, "white coat syndrome" and other biases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Current tools for Alzheimer's disease screening and staging used in clinical research (e.g. ACE-3, ADAS-Cog) require substantial face-to-face time with trained professionals, and may be affected by subjectivity, "white coat syndrome" and other biases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Many outcome measures used in AD clinical trials require clinic visits and are paper based, making them infrequent and burdensome 'snapshots', subject to rater bias. A consortium of 10 pharma companies came together with Cumulus Neuroscience to design a solution for frequent, objective, real-world measurement across a range of domains. We present a study that examined the feasibility of asking patients with mild dementia to use the neuroassessment platform repeatedly at home for one year.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSubstance use, including cigarettes and cannabis, is associated with poorer sustained attention in late adolescence and early adulthood. Previous studies were predominantly cross-sectional or under-powered and could not indicate if impairment in sustained attention was a predictor of substance-use or a marker of the inclination to engage in such behaviour. This study explored the relationship between sustained attention and substance use across a longitudinal span from ages 14 to 23 in over 1,000 participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent advances have enabled the creation of wireless, "dry" electroencephalography (EEG) recording systems, and easy-to-use engaging tasks, that can be operated repeatedly by naïve users, unsupervised in the home. Here, we evaluated the validity of dry-EEG, cognitive task gamification, and unsupervised home-based recordings used in combination. Two separate cohorts of participants-older and younger adults-collected data at home over several weeks using a wireless dry EEG system interfaced with a tablet for task presentation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe flexible adjustment of ongoing behavior challenges the nervous system's dynamic control mechanisms and has shown to be specifically susceptible to age-related decline. Previous work links endogenous gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) with behavioral efficiency across perceptual and cognitive domains, with potentially the strongest impact on those behaviors that require a high level of dynamic control. Our analysis integrated behavior and modulation of interhemispheric phase-based connectivity during dynamic motor-state transitions with endogenous GABA concentration in adult human volunteers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAging affects the brain at the anatomical and functional levels, resulting in a decline in motor and cognitive performance. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies documented lower connectivity within brain networks and higher connectivity between them, for older as compared with young adults. However, it is still unclear whether the reduced segregation between networks, as observed with fMRI, has neurophysiological underpinnings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImplications of structural connections within and between brain regions for their functional counterpart are timely points of discussion. White matter microstructural organization and functional activity can be assessed in unison. At first glance, however, the corresponding findings appear variable, both in the healthy brain and in numerous neuro-pathologies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccess to affordable, objective and scalable biomarkers of brain function is needed to transform the healthcare burden of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disease. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, both resting and in combination with targeted cognitive tasks, have demonstrated utility in tracking disease state and therapy response in a range of conditions from schizophrenia to Alzheimer's disease. But conventional methods of recording this data involve burdensome clinic visits, and behavioural tasks that are not effective in frequent repeated use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn humans, impaired response inhibition is characteristic of a wide range of psychiatric diseases and of normal aging. It is hypothesized that the right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC) plays a key role by inhibiting the motor cortex via the basal ganglia. The electroencephalography (EEG)-derived β-rhythm (15-29 Hz) is thought to reflect communication within this network, with increased right frontal β-power often observed before successful response inhibition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotor control is a fundamental challenge for the central nervous system. In this review, we show that unimanual movements involve bi-hemispheric activation patterns that resemble the bilateral neural activation typically observed for bimanual movements. For unimanual movements, the activation patterns in the ipsilateral hemisphere arguably entail processes that serve to suppress interhemispheric cross-talk through transcallosal tracts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain-predicted age difference scores are calculated by subtracting chronological age from 'brain' age, which is estimated using neuroimaging data. Positive scores reflect accelerated ageing and are associated with increased mortality risk and poorer physical function. To date, however, the relationship between brain-predicted age difference scores and specific cognitive functions has not been systematically examined using appropriate statistical methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been described as having altered resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) spectral power and theta/beta ratio (TBR). However, a recent review (Pulini et al. 2018) identified methodological errors in neuroimaging, including EEG, ADHD classification studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Altered brain functional connectivity has been shown in youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, relatively little is known about functional connectivity in adult ADHD, and how it is linked with the heritability of ADHD.
Methods: We measured eyes-open and eyes-closed resting electroencephalography (EEG) from 38 adults with ADHD, 45 1st degree relatives of people with ADHD and 51 healthy controls.
Impulsivity is a multidimensional construct that is related to different aspects of alcohol use, abuse, and dependence. Inhibitory control, one facet of impulsivity, can be assayed using the stop-signal task (SST) and quantified behaviorally via the stop-signal reaction time (SSRT) and electrophysiologically using event-related potentials (ERPs). Research on the relationship between alcohol use and SSRTs, and between alcohol use and inhibitory-control ERPs, is mixed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated how older adults preserve the capability to acquire new motor skills in the face of age-related brain alterations. We assessed neural changes associated with learning a bimanual coordination task over 4 days of practice in healthy young (n = 24) and older adults (n = 24). The electroencephalogram was recorded during task performance at the start and end of training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe studied the relationship between age-related differences in inter- and intra-hemispheric structural and functional connectivity in the bilateral motor network. Our focus was on the correlation between connectivity and declined motor performance in older adults. Structural and functional connectivity were estimated using diffusion weighted imaging and resting-state electro-encephalography, respectively.
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