Publications by authors named "Maria Kaltsa"

Background: The assessment of language deficits can be valuable in the early clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Objective: The present study aims to explore whether language markers at the macrostructural level could assist with the placement of an individual across the dementia continuum employing production data from structured narratives.

Methods: We administered a Picture Sequence Narrative Discourse Task to 170 speakers of Greek: young healthy controls (yHC), cognitively intact healthy elders (eHC), elder participants with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and with AD dementia at the mild/moderate stages.

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Background: Earlier research focuses primarily on the cognitive changes due to Alzheimer's disease (AD); however, little is known with regard to changes in language competence across the lifespan.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate the decline of language skills at the grammatical and syntactic levels due to changes in cognitive function.

Methods: We administered the Litmus Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) to 150 native speakers of Greek who fall into five groups: 1) young healthy speakers, 2) cognitively intact elder healthy speakers, 3) speakers with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), 4) speakers with mild cognitive impairment (MCI); and 5) speakers with AD dementia at the mild/moderate stages.

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Introduction: The testing of visuocognitive development in preterm infants shows strong interactions between perinatal characteristics and cognition, learning and overall neurodevelopment evolution. The assessment of anticipatory gaze data of object-location bindings via eye-tracking can predict the neurodevelopment of preterm infants at the age of 3 years; little is known, however, about the early cognitive function and its assessment methods during the first year of life.

Methods: The current study presents data from a novel assessment tool, a Delayed Match Retrieval (DMR) paradigm via eye-tracking was used to measure visual working memory (VWM) and attention skills.

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The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in homonym meaning activation in monolingual speakers of Greek, children and adults, using a cross-modal priming paradigm.

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The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular.

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Aim: This study assessed the presence of specific antibodies for coeliac disease in outpatients suffering from eating disorders before and after nutritional intervention. We also evaluated whether those patients should undergo regular screening for coeliac disease.

Methods: The sample consisted of 154 patients with a mean age of 16.

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Kawasaki disease is a systemic vasculitis of unknown etiology, presenting typically in infants and young children. We report a rare case of incomplete Kawasaki disease in a 15-month-old male infant presenting with symptoms mimicking retropharyngeal abscess and intermittent fever.

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Introduction: Hepatic and splenic hemangiomas are common benign tumors that mainly affect female patients. Giant splenic hemangiomas are extremely rare, especially when correlated with multiple hepatic hemangiomas. Pathogenetic mechanisms between hemangiomas and oral contraceptives, as well as therapeutic approaches, are analyzed in this case report, in particular for the management of synchronous splenic and hepatic hemangiomas.

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