Pharmacotherapy for behavioural manifestations in frontotemporal dementia: An expert consensus from the European Reference Network for Rare Neurological Diseases (ERN-RND).

Background And Purpose: Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by pervasive personality and behavioural disturbances with severe impact on patients and caregivers. In current clinical practice, treatment is based on nonpharmacological and pharmacological approaches. Unfortunately, trial-based evidence supporting symptomatic pharmacological treatment for the behavioural disturbances in FTD is scarce despite the significant burden this poses on the patients and caregivers.

Gray Matter Changes in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's Disease and Relation to Cognition.

Purpose Of Review: We summarize structural (s)MRI findings of gray matter (GM) atrophy related to cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) in light of new analytical approaches and recent longitudinal studies results.

Recent Findings: The hippocampus-to-cortex ratio seems to be the best sMRI biomarker to discriminate between various AD subtypes, following the spatial distribution of tau pathology, and predict rate of cognitive decline. PD is clinically far more variable than AD, with heterogeneous underlying brain pathology.

Evaluation of different cerebrospinal fluid and white matter fMRI filtering strategies-Quantifying noise removal and neural signal preservation.

This study examines the impact of using different cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and white matter (WM) nuisance signals for data-driven filtering of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data as a cleanup method before analyzing intrinsic brain fluctuations. The routinely used temporal signal-to-noise ratio metric is inappropriate for assessing fMRI filtering suitability, as it evaluates only the reduction of data variability and does not assess the preservation of signals of interest. We defined a new metric that evaluates the preservation of selected neural signal correlates, and we compared its performance with a recently published signal-noise separation metric.

Changes in connectivity of the posterior default network node during visual processing in mild cognitive impairment: staged decline between normal aging and Alzheimer's disease.

Visual processing difficulties are often present in Alzheimer's disease (AD), even in its pre-dementia phase (i.e. in mild cognitive impairment, MCI).

Mortality due to traumatic spinal cord injuries in Europe: a cross-sectional and pooled analysis of population-wide data from 22 countries.

Background: Traumatic spinal cord injuries (TSCI) pose a significant burden globally, while existing epidemiological data-especially on population mortality-are limited. The aim of this study was to calculate the age-standardized population mortality rates attributable to TSCI in 22 European countries, along with the pooled age-standardized mortality rate attributable to TSCI in Europe.

Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional epidemiological study was conducted.

Disruption of resting functional connectivity in Alzheimer's patients and at-risk subjects.

The resting brain exhibits continuous intrinsic activity, which is correlated between groups of regions forming resting state networks. Evaluating resting connectivity is a popular approach for studying brain diseases. Several hundred studies are now available that address integrity of resting connectivity in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), as well as preclinical at-risk subjects.

Default mode network connectivity patterns associated with visual processing at different stages of Parkinson's disease.

Background: The default mode network (DMN) decreases its activity when switching from a resting state to a cognitive task condition, while activity of the network engaged in the given task increases. Visual processing is typically disturbed in Parkinson's disease dementia (PDD).

Objective: Using functional MRI, we studied the DMN effective connectivity patterns in PDD as compared with cognitively normal patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and healthy controls (HC) when switching from baseline to a visual cognitive task condition.

Disturbed default mode network connectivity patterns in Alzheimer's disease associated with visual processing.

Changes in connectivity of the posterior node of the default mode network (DMN) were studied when switching from baseline to a cognitive task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In all, 15 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 18 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy controls (HC) participated in the study. Psychophysiological interactions analysis was used to assess the specific alterations in the DMN connectivity (deactivation-based) due to psychological effects from the complex visual scene encoding task.

Predictors of depression symptoms in patients with diabetes in Slovakia.

Objective: The patterns of relationships between diabetes and depression in countries of central and eastern Europe (CEE) might differ from those in countries of western Europe and the United States. Among the reasons are specifics of transitioning healthcare systems (including mental health) and the general social, cultural, and economic background of these countries. The aim of this article is to analyze the prevalence of depression symptoms in patients with diabetes in Slovakia and to identify its predictors.