Publications by authors named "Magdalena Beran"
Background: Middle-aged and older adults presenting clinically relevant depressive symptoms are often undiagnosed. Understanding the determinants of late-life depressive symptoms could improve prognosis. Further, individuals with manifest cardiovascular disease (CVD) are at an increased risk of depression.
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- Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) are designed to improve trial participation by moving activities closer to participants, but understanding what motivates people to join these trials, especially those with type 2 diabetes, is still unclear.
- Focus groups in the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria with participants aged around 66 identified seven key themes about trial participation, including location, time, interaction with healthcare professionals, and technology use, revealing a total of 20 different motivating factors.
- The most significant motivators for DCT participation were flexibility in location and time; however, factors like digital infrastructure and personal interaction were seen as both helpful and challenging, suggesting future DCT designs could benefit from addressing these barriers directly.
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- This study examined the link between plasma biomarkers indicating endothelial dysfunction and cognitive performance in a sample of 9,414 older adults from the Netherlands, aged 57 to 93 years.
- Researchers created a composite score from three specific biomarkers and assessed various cognitive functions like executive function and memory.
- Results indicated a small, consistent association between higher endothelial dysfunction scores and poorer cognitive performance, but no evidence suggested that these markers influenced cognitive decline over time.
Article Synopsis
- The study investigated how age, education, and sex/gender relate to performance in semantic fluency, which is the ability to generate words within a certain category.
- Data from 2,391 individuals across three different cohorts were analyzed, measuring factors like average cluster size and lexical decision response time in addition to the total number of words generated.
- Results indicated that older age and being female were both linked to lower performance in word generation, while higher education correlated with better performance across various metrics, showing consistent trends across different cohorts.
Background: Establishing collaborations between cohort studies has been fundamental for progress in health research. However, such collaborations are hampered by heterogeneous data representations across cohorts and legal constraints to data sharing. The first arises from a lack of consensus in standards of data collection and representation across cohort studies and is usually tackled by applying data harmonization processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Microvascular dysfunction is involved in the development of various cerebral disorders. It may contribute to these disorders by disrupting white matter tracts and altering brain connectivity, but evidence is scarce. We investigated the association between multiple biomarkers of microvascular function and whole-brain white matter connectivity.
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- This study examines how personal background factors, such as hobbies, might influence performance in a semantic fluency task focused on naming animals, highlighting the impact of specific animal class knowledge.
- Researchers analyzed data from 736 Dutch adults, revealing that various levels of knowledge about animal classes correlated with participants’ background characteristics and cognitive abilities.
- Findings indicate that individuals recalled higher numbers of specific animals were typically older, predominantly male, and often retired, and performed better on overall fluency tasks.
What Drives Task Performance in Animal Fluency in Individuals Without Dementia? The SMART-MR Study.
J Speech Lang Hear Res
September 2023
Purpose: In this study, we aim to understand whether and how performance in animal fluency (i.e., total correct word count) relates to linguistic levels and/or executive functions by looking at sequence information and item-level metrics (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Hyperglycemia constitutes a likely pathway linking diabetes and depressive symptoms; lowering glycemic levels may help reduce diabetes-comorbid depressive symptoms. Since randomized controlled trials can help understand temporal associations, we systematically reviewed the evidence regarding the potential association of hemoglobin HbA1c lowering interventions with depressive symptoms.
Methods: PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and EMBASE databases were searched for randomized controlled trials evaluating HbA1c-lowering interventions and including assessment of depressive symptoms published between 01/2000-09/2020.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia, characterized by the aggregation of amyloid-beta (Aβ) proteins into plaques. Individuals with AD frequently show mixed pathologies, often caused by cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD), resulting in lesions such as white matter hyperintensities (WMH). The current systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the cross-sectional relationship between amyloid burden and WMH in older adults without objective cognitive impairment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: To investigate whether there is a bidirectional longitudinal association of depression with HbA .
Methods: We conducted a systematic literature search in PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL and EMBASE for observational, longitudinal studies published from January 2000 to September 2020, assessing the association between depression and HbA in adults. We assessed study quality with the Newcastle-Ottawa-Scale.
Pathological tau is suggested to play a role in cognitive deterioration in the preclinical phase of Alzheimer's disease. We investigated cross-sectional associations of tau burden with episodic and semantic memory performance in older adults without dementia. A systematic search in MEDLINE (via PubMed), PsychINFO, and Embase resulted in 24 eligible studies for meta-analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: Social network characteristics may provide a novel non-pharmaceutical target for the prevention of depression. We investigated the temporal association of a broad range of structural and functional social network characteristics with incident depressive symptoms over 5 years of follow-up.
Methods: We used data from The Maastricht Study, a population-based prospective cohort study (n=2,465, mean age 59.
Quality control of brain segmentation is a fundamental step to ensure data quality. Manual quality control strategies are the current gold standard, although these may be unfeasible for large neuroimaging samples. Several options for automated quality control have been proposed, providing potential time efficient and reproducible alternatives.
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