Exploring self-experience practices in dementia care: A scoping review.

Background: Recognised as essential for high-quality dementia service, person-centred care aims to understand and respect the unique needs of each individual. Self-experience practices may offer caregivers an opportunity to acquire knowledge, empathy, and skills related to person-centred care, especially through recreating experiences similar to dementia. Given the need to enhance the understanding of self-experience practices in dementia care, a more comprehensive investigation of these training interventions for (future) caregivers is needed.

Artificial intelligence of imaging and clinical neurological data for predictive, preventive and personalized (P3) medicine for Parkinson Disease: The NeuroArtP3 protocol for a multi-center research study.

Background: The burden of Parkinson Disease (PD) represents a key public health issue and it is essential to develop innovative and cost-effective approaches to promote sustainable diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. In this perspective the adoption of a P3 (predictive, preventive and personalized) medicine approach seems to be pivotal. The NeuroArtP3 (NET-2018-12366666) is a four-year multi-site project co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Health, bringing together clinical and computational centers operating in the field of neurology, including PD.

Visuospatial Deficits Are Associated with Pisa Syndrome and not Camptocormia in Parkinson's Disease.

Background: Pisa syndrome (PS) and camptocormia (CC) are postural abnormalities frequently associated with Parkinson's disease (PD). Their pathophysiology remains unclear, but the role of cognitive deficits has been postulated.

Objectives: To identify differences in the neuropsychological functioning of patients with PD with PS or CC compared with matched patients with PD without postural abnormalities.

Improvement in motor symptoms, physical fatigue, and self-rated change perception in functional motor disorders: a prospective cohort study of a 12-week telemedicine program.

Background: Functional motor disorders (FMDs) are highly disabling conditions associated with long-term disability, poor quality of life, and economic burden on health and social care. While multidisciplinary 5-days rehabilitation programs have been shown to reduce motor and non-motor symptoms, long-term management and monitoring in FMDs remain an unmet need.

Aim: To compare a 12-weeks telemedicine program against a 12-weeks self-management program after a 5-days rehabilitation program for improving motor, non-motor symptoms, quality of life, and perception of change in patients with FMDs.

The impact of recurrent Covid-19 waves on patients with Functional Movement Disorders: A follow-up study.

Background: Functional Movement Disorders (FMDs) might exacerbate in stressful conditions. As the global health emergency due to Covid-19 rise and multiple waves hit the Italian population, the recurrent severe restrictions' periods imposed could represent important triggers and worsen the symptoms of FMDs. Through a follow-up study, we compare results on Motor Symptoms (MS), Non-Motor Symptoms (NMS), and Global Health Status (GHS) of two surveys, one referred to the first Covid-19 wave and the other to the third Covid-19 wave.

Neural Correlates of Letter and Semantic Fluency in Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Verbal fluency (VF) is an informative cognitive task. Lesion and functional imaging studies implicate distinct cerebral areas that support letter versus semantic fluency and the understanding of neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying task performance. Most lesion studies include chronic stroke patients.

Effectiveness of self-help plus (SH+) in reducing anxiety and post-traumatic symptomatology among care home workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a randomized controlled trial.

This article describes a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a supervised online delivery of self-help plus (SH+), during the second wave of COVID-19 contagions in Northern Italy. The SH+ is a psychological intervention developed by the World Health Organization to increase a person's ability to deal with stress. In this trial, it was tested primarily as a tool to reduce anxiety and post-traumatic symptomatology in workers of residential nursing and care homes.

The Role of Brief Global Cognitive Tests and Neuropsychological Expertise in the Detection and Differential Diagnosis of Dementia.

Dementia is a global public health problem and its impact is bound to increase in the next decades, with a rapidly aging world population. Dementia is by no means an obligatory outcome of aging, although its incidence increases exponentially in old age, and its onset may be insidious. In the absence of unequivocal biomarkers, the accuracy of cognitive profiling plays a fundamental role in the diagnosis of this condition.

Movement perception of the tonic vibration reflex is abnormal in functional limb weakness.

Introduction: We tested the hypothesis that functional limb weakness is associated with possible dysfunction of the central processing of proprioceptive information, by evaluating the amount of tonic vibration reflex (TVR) and the perception of the TVR movement.

Methods: The study sample was 20 patients with functional weakness of the lower and/or the upper limbs and 25 healthy controls; delivery of 92-Hz transcutaneous vibration of the biceps brachii tendon of the unrestrained arm stimulated predominantly the muscle spindle afferent and elicited elbow flexion (tonic vibration reflex, TVR). Blindfolded participants had to match the final position of the vibrated arm with their contralateral tracking arm.

Motor and non-motor outcomes after a rehabilitation program for patients with Functional Motor Disorders: A prospective, observational cohort study.

Background: Rehabilitation has proven effective in improving motor symptoms (i.e., weakness, tremor, gait and balance disorders) in patients with Functional Motor Disorders (FMDs).

Prevalence of post-traumatic symptomatology and anxiety among residential nursing and care home workers following the first COVID-19 outbreak in Northern Italy.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has been officially linked to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the globe in just a few months. It is particularly lethal for the elderly in general, as well as for populations residing in long-term stay facilities. By this time, those working and caring for high-risk populations have been exposed to very intense and sudden levels of physical and psychological strain.

Smell and taste dissociations in the modulation of tonic pain perception induced by a capsaicin cream application.

Background: Pain is a subjective experience characterized by sensory (intensity) and emotional (unpleasantness) aspects. Although literature reports behavioural effects on pain due to smell and taste influence, to our knowledge the relationship between tonic pain induced by a capsaicin cream and these chemosensory systems has never been explored before. The aim of this study was to investigate the modulation of olfactory and gustatory substances having different valence on tonic pain perception mediated by a capsaicin cream application.

Attentional avoidance of emotions in functional movement disorders.

Objective: Emotional difficulties are common in functional movement disorders (FMD), yet their contribution to the disease remains unclear. We explored the potential role of emotional difficulties as risk and maintaining factors of FMD by looking at the effect of emotions on attention.

Method: The dot-probe task was used to investigate attentional biases induced by emotional faces in 25 patients with FMD and 25 healthy controls (HC).

Perception of phasic pain is modulated by smell and taste.

Background: Pain perception is a multimodal experience composed of sensory, emotional and cognitive dimensions. Accumulating evidence suggests that the chemical senses can influence pain perception, but their relation with phasic pain is still unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of smell and taste having different valence on phasic pain.

The Neural Representations of Movement across Semantic Categories.

Previous evidence from neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies suggests functional specialization for tools and related semantic knowledge in a left frontoparietal network. It is still debated whether these areas are involved in the representation of rudimentary movement-relevant knowledge regardless of semantic domains (animate vs. inanimate) or categories (tools vs.

The Role of Language Severity and Education in Explaining Performance on Object and Action Naming in Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Despite the common assumption that atrophy in a certain brain area would compromise the function that it subserves, this is not always the case, especially in complex clinical syndromes such as primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Clinical and demographic information may contribute to PPA phenotypes and explain the manifested impairments better than atrophy. In the present study, we asked how much variance of the object and action naming impairments observed in PPA may be attributed to atrophy in the language network alone vs.

Singing numbers…in cognitive space--a dual-task study of the link between pitch, space, and numbers.

We assessed the automaticity of spatial-numerical and spatial-musical associations by testing their intentionality and load sensitivity in a dual-task paradigm. In separate sessions, 16 healthy adults performed magnitude and pitch comparisons on sung numbers with variable pitch. Stimuli and response alternatives were identical, but the relevant stimulus attribute (pitch or number) differed between tasks.

Unimanual SNARC Effect: Hand Matters.

A structural representation of the hand embedding information about the identity and relative position of fingers is necessary to counting routines. It may also support associations between numbers and allocentric spatial codes that predictably interact with other known numerical spatial representations, such as the mental number line (MNL). In this study, 48 Western participants whose typical counting routine proceeded from thumb-to-little on both hands performed magnitude and parity binary judgments.

Distinct neural substrates for semantic knowledge and naming in the temporoparietal network.

Patients with anterior temporal lobe (ATL) lesions show semantic and lexical retrieval deficits, and the differential role of this area in the 2 processes is debated. Functional neuroimaging in healthy individuals has not clarified the matter because semantic and lexical processes usually occur simultaneously and automatically. Furthermore, the ATL is a region challenging for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) due to susceptibility artifacts, especially at high fields.