An international core outcome set for primary progressive aphasia (COS-PPA): Consensus-based recommendations for communication interventions across research and clinical settings.

Introduction: Interventions to treat speech-language difficulties in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) often use word accuracy as a highly comparable outcome. However, there are more constructs of importance to people with PPA that have received less attention.

Methods: Following Core Outcome Set Standards for Development Recommendations (COSSTAD), this study comprised: Stage 1 - systematic review to identify measures; Stage 2 - consensus groups to identify important outcome constructs for people with PPA (n = 82) and care partners (n = 91); Stage 3 - e-Delphi consensus with 57 researchers.

Development of the Brazilian version of the Mini-Addenbrooke Cognitive Examination (M-ACE BR) to screen for cognitive impairment in older adults.

Background:  Age is the most important risk factor for develop dementia, and the recommendation is that older adults are cognitively tested to detect impairment in the initial stage for adequate treatment. The demand for the care of these older adults is great, drawing attention to the need for rapid tests, with good accuracy and simple application to identify cognitive impairment.

Objective:  To develop and validate the Brazilian Mini-Addenbrooke Cognitive Examination (M-ACE BR) as a short screening test for cognitive impairment in older adults.

Intervention and Prevention of Dementia in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) of China.

Reserve and resilience are recognized as essential for effective intervention and prevention of dementia. However, it is not known if these factors also protect against risk for dementia in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) of Mainland China. Studies of risk factors across regions of China provide an evidence base for future research in the GBA.

Clustering and Switching on verbal fluency tests in elementary school children with and without learning difficulties.

Purpose: Evaluate the performance in the Semantic and Phonemic Verbal Fluency tests in relation to the cognitive components of clustering and switching and explore the changes in development in elementary school.

Methods: Participants were 68 children from the 2nd to 5th grade of elementary school of a public school in the municipality of Santo André, divided into two groups, Learning Difficulty (LD) and Typical Development (TD).

Results: The Verbal Fluency tests were compared for the number of clusters, mean size of the clusters, and number of switches.

Does Language Distance Modulate the Contribution of Bilingualism to Cognitive Reserve in Seniors? A Systematic Review.

We report a systematic review and exploratory meta-regression investigating the hypothesis that the effects of bilingualism on cognitive reserve are modulated by the distance between the pair of languages a bilingual uses. An inclusive multiple database search was performed in order to identify all relevant published research conducted in bilingual seniors. A combination of qualitative and quantitative synthesis methods were used in order to investigate our research questions.

The Discourse Profile in Corticobasal Syndrome: A Comprehensive Clinical and Biomarker Approach.

The aim of this study was to characterize the oral discourse of CBS patients and to verify whether measures obtained during a semi-spontaneous speech production could differentiate CBS patients from controls. A second goal was to compare the performance of patients with CBS probably due to Alzheimer's disease (CBS-AD) pathology and CBS not related to AD (CBS-non-AD) in the same measures, based on the brain metabolic status (FDG-PET) and in the presence of amyloid deposition (amyloid-PET). Results showed that CBS patients were significantly different from controls in speech rate, lexical level, informativeness, and syntactic complexity.

Diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia: recommendations of the Scientific Department of Cognitive Neurology and Aging of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology.

"Frontotemporal dementia" (FTD) is a clinical syndrome characterized by the focal involvement of the frontal and/or temporal lobes. FTD has three clinical phenotypes: the behavioral variant and two linguistic subtypes, namely, non-fluent/agrammatic primary progressive aphasia (PPA-NF/A) and semantic PPA (PPA-S). FTD is the second most common cause of dementia in individuals under the age of 65 years.

Correction: Machado et al. Cognitive Intervention Strategies Directed to Speech and Language Deficits in Primary Progressive Aphasia: Practice-Based Evidence from 18 Cases. 2021, , 1268.

We would like to have these issues corrected to our recent publication [...

RastrOS Project: Natural Language Processing contributions to the development of an eye-tracking corpus with predictability norms for Brazilian Portuguese.

This article presents RastrOS, a new eye-tracking corpus of eye movement data from university students during silent reading of paragraphs of texts in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The article shows the potential of the corpus for natural language processing (NLP) using it to evaluate the sentence complexity prediction task in BP and it also focuses on the description of NLP resources and methods developed to create the corpus. Specifically, we present: (i) the method used to select the corpus paragraphs from large corpora, using linguistic metrics and clustering algorithms; (ii) the platform for collecting the Cloze test, which is also responsible for creating the project datasets, and (iii) the hybrid semantic similarity method, based on word embedding models and contextualised word representations, used to generate semantic predictability norms.

Sentence Comprehension in Primary Progressive Aphasia: A Study of the Application of the Brazilian Version of the Test for the Reception of Grammar (TROG2-Br).

Unlabelled: Sentence-comprehension deficits have been described in patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). However, most instruments to address this domain in more detail and in a clinical context have not been adapted and translated into several languages, posing limitations to clinical practice and cross-language research.

Objectives: The study aimed to (1) test the applicability of the Brazilian version of the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG2-Br) to detect morphosyntactic deficits in patients with PPA; (2) investigate the association between performance in the test and sociodemographic and clinical variables (age, years of formal education, and disease duration); (3) characterize the performance of individuals presenting with the three more common variants of PPA (non-fluent, semantic, and logopenic) and mixed PPA (PPA-Mx) and analyze whether TROG-2 may assist in the distinction of these clinical profiles.

Word and pseudoword reading in young adults: an eye-tracking study.

Purpose: To evaluate and characterize the oculomotor behavior during the reading of words and pseudowords in Brazilian Portuguese organized by frequency, length and regularity and verify its association with performance on neuropsychological tests.

Methods: 21 university students, with a mean age of 20.9 years, were submitted to a word and pseudoword reading task (TLPP) from the Anele Battery, in addition to verbal fluency and phonological working memory tests.

Cognitive Intervention Strategies Directed to Speech and Language Deficits in Primary Progressive Aphasia: Practice-Based Evidence from 18 Cases.

Background: Practice-based evidence can inform and support clinical decision making. Case-report series about the implementation of programs in real-world clinical settings may contribute to verifying the effectiveness of interventions for treating PPA in specific contexts, as well as illustrating challenges that need to be overcome.

Objective: To describe and provide practice-based evidence on the effectiveness of four cognitive rehabilitation programs designed for individuals with PPA and directed to speech and language impairments, which were implemented in a specialized outpatient clinic.

Student's Perspective and Teachers' Metacognition: Applications of Eye-Tracking in Education and Scientific Research in Schools.

This Perspective article discusses the possible contributions of eye-tracking (ET) to the field of Educational Neuroscience based on an application of this tool at schools. We sought to explore the teachers' view of ET videos recorded while students solved mathematical problems. More than 90% of the teachers could predict with great accuracy whether the students had answered the questions correctly or not based solely on the information provided by the ET videos.

Free Recall of Bound Information Held in Short-Term Memory is Unimpaired by Age and Education.

Objectives: It has been challenging to identify cognitive markers to differentiate healthy brain aging from neurodegeneration due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) that are not affected by age and education. The Short-Term Memory Binding (STMB) showed not to be affected by age or education when using the change detection paradigm. However, no previous study has tested the effect of age and education using the free recall paradigm of the STMB.

Recalling feature bindings differentiates Alzheimer's disease from frontotemporal dementia.

It has been challenging to identify clinical cognitive markers that can differentiate patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) from those with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). The short-term memory binding (STMB) test assesses the ability to integrate colors and shapes into unified representations and to hold them temporarily during online performance. The objective of this study is to investigate whether free recall deficits during short-term memory binding (STMB) test can differentiate patients with AD from those with bvFTD and controls.

Lexical-retrieval and semantic memory in Parkinson's disease: The question of noun and verb dissociation.

The dissociation between the processing of verbs and nouns has been debated in light of the Embodied Cognition Theory (EC). The objective of this paper is to verify how action and verb processing deficits of PD patients are modulated by different tasks with different cognitive demands. Action and object lexical-semantic processing was evaluated in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) and cognitively healthy controls through three different tasks (verbal fluency, naming and semantic association).

Performance of the Visual Analogue Scale of Happiness and of the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia in the Tremembé Epidemiological Study, Brazil.

Unlabelled: Depression is a major growing public health problem. Many population studies have found a significant relationship between depression and the presence of cognitive disorders.

Objective: To establish the correlation between the Visual Analogue Scale of Happiness and the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia in the population aged 60 years or over in the city of Tremembé, state of São Paulo, Brazil.

Defining multivariate normative rules for healthy aging using neuroimaging and machine learning: an application to Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Neuroimaging techniques combined with computational neuroanatomy have been playing a role in the investigation of healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). The definition of normative rules for brain features is a crucial step to establish typical and atypical aging trajectories.

Objective: To introduce an unsupervised pattern recognition method; to define multivariate normative rules of neuroanatomical measures; and to propose a brain abnormality index.

Brief intervention for agrammatism in Primary Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia: A case report.

The non-fluent and agrammatic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (NFPPA) is characterized by reduced verbal production with deficits in building grammatically correct sentences, involving dysfunctions in syntactic and morphological levels of language. There are a growing number of studies about non-pharmacological alternatives focusing on the rehabilitation of functional aspects or specific cognitive impairments of each variant of PPA. This study reports a short-term treatment administered to a patient with NFPPA focusing on the production of sentences.

Semantic memory for actions as assessed by the Kissing and Dancing Test: Education and age effects in cognitively healthy individuals.

Unlabelled: Action semantics is a relevant part of cognitive-linguistic assessment and the "Kissing and Dancing Test" (KDT) has been used extensively for this purpose, evidencing clinical distinctions among brain-damaged patients. To enhance its use, reference values are necessary, especially for populations with heterogeneous educational levels and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Objective: To analyze the effects of schooling and age on the KDT in cognitively unimpaired individuals.

Evolution of language assessment in patients with acquired neurological disorders in Brazil.

The objective of this paper was to describe the evolution of language assessments in patients with acquired neurological diseases over a period of around 45 years from 1970, when interdisciplinarity in Neuropsychology first began in Brazil, to the present day. The first twenty years of data was based on memories of Speech Pathology University Professors who were in charge of teaching aphasia. We then show the contributions of Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, as well as Psycholinguistic and Psychometric criteria, to language evaluation.

Action/Verb processing: Debates in neuroimaging and the contribution of studies in patients with Parkinson's disease.

The objective of the current review was to verify whether studies investigating lexical-semantic difficulties in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) support the Embodied Cognition model. Under this framework, it is predicted that patients with PD will have more difficulties in the semantic processing of action concepts (action verbs) than of motionless objects. We also verified how and whether these studies are following current debates of Neuroscience, particularly the debate between the Lexical and the Embodied Cognition models.

Detecting limited health literacy in Brazil: development of a multidimensional screening tool.

Screening questions have been proposed as practical tools for detecting limited functional health literacy, but have achieved only moderate accuracy in previous studies. We hypothesized that a combination of screening questions and demographic characteristics could better predict a patient's functional health literacy. Three hundred and twenty-two hospital users from São Paulo, Brazil, were interviewed for demographic information and answered questions about literacy habits and perceived difficulties.

Nonpharmacological interventions for cognitive impairments following primary progressive aphasia: a systematic review of the literature.

Unlabelled: This study provided a systematic review on nonpharmacological interventions applied to patients diagnosed with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and its variants: Semantic (SPPA), Nonfluent (NFPPA) and Logopenic (LPPA) to establish evidence-based recommendations for the clinical practice of cognitive rehabilitation for these patients.

Methods: A PubMed and LILACS literature search with no time restriction was conducted with the keywords (and its variants) AND OR OR OR OR OR . To develop its evidence-based recommendations, a research committee identified questions to be addressed and determined the level of evidence for each study according to published criteria (Cicerone et al.