Initial Heart Rate Reactivity to Socioemotional Pictures in Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease.

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often have generalized anxiety, particularly in early-onset AD (EOAD) or the first stages of their disease. This increased anxiety could be associated with decreased sensorimotor gating with increased attention to significant stimuli from AD pathology in the entorhinal cortex. We investigated whether widening initial attention to socioemotional stimuli was association with anxiety among 16 patients with first stage EOAD compared to 19 normal controls (NCs).

White Matter Changes Associated with Resting Sympathetic Tone in Frontotemporal Dementia vs. Alzheimer's Disease.

Background: Resting sympathetic tone, a measure of physiological arousal, is decreased in patients with apathy and inertia, such as those with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and other frontally-predominant disorders.

Objective: To identify the neuroanatomical correlates of skin conductance levels (SCLs), an index of resting sympathetic tone and apathy, among patients with bvFTD, where SCLs is decreased, compared to those with Alzheimer's disease (AD), where it is not.

Methods: This study analyzed bvFTD (n = 14) patients and a comparison group with early-onset AD (n = 19).

A scale of socioemotional dysfunction in frontotemporal dementia.

Early social dysfunction is a hallmark symptom of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD); however, validated measures for assessing social deficits in dementia are needed. The purpose of the current study was to examine the utility of a novel informant-based measure of social impairment, the Socioemotional Dysfunction Scale (SDS) in early-onset dementia. Sixteen bvFTD and 18 early-onset Alzheimer's disease (EOAD) participants received standard clinical neuropsychological measures and neuroimaging.

Rich club network analysis shows distinct patterns of disruption in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Diffusion imaging and brain connectivity analyses can reveal the underlying organizational patterns of the human brain, described as complex networks of densely interlinked regions. Here, we analyzed 1.5-Tesla whole-brain diffusion-weighted images from 64 participants - 15 patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal (bvFTD) dementia, 19 with early-onset Alzheimer's disease (EOAD), and 30 healthy elderly controls.

Hippocampal and mesial temporal sclerosis in early-onset frontotemporal lobar degeneration versus Alzheimer's disease.

Hippocampal sclerosis (HS) and mesial temporal sclerosis (MTS) may occur with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) as well as with normal aging. Prior studies suggest that HS/MTS may be more closely associated with FTLD but have not directly compared the prevalence and clinical characteristics of HS/MTS between neuropathologically confirmed early-onset (age ≤ 65) cohorts of FTLD and AD. We identified patients with early-onset FTLD (n = 136) and AD (n = 267) from National Alzheimer's Center Consortium databases and compared neuropathological and clinical data between these 2 groups.

Clinicopathologic differences among patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia.

Objective: To characterize the presenting symptoms and signs of patients clinically diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and who had different neuropathologic findings on autopsy.

Methods: This study reviewed all patients entered as clinical bvFTD in the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center's database and who had both clinical and neuropathologic data from 2005 to 2011. Among the 107 patients identified, 95 had unambiguous pathologic findings, including 74 with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (bvFTD-FTLD) and 21 with Alzheimer disease (bvFTD-AD).

Nonamnestic presentations of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Early-onset Alzheimer's disease (EOAD) beginning before the age of 65 may differ from late-onset AD (LOAD) in clinical course and frequency of nonamnestic presentations. In a 10-year retrospective review, 125 patients with EOAD, diagnosed clinically and verified by functional neuroimaging, were compared with 56 patients with LOAD and further classified depending on predominant cognitive difficulty on presentation. Eighty (64%) of the patients with EOAD had a nonamnestic presentation, compared with only 7 (12.

Comparison of clinical characteristics between familial and non-familial early onset Alzheimer's disease.

Although familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD) is an early onset AD (EAD), most patients with EAD do not have a familial disorder. Recent guidelines recommend testing for genes causing FAD only in those EAD patients with two first-degree relatives. However, some patients with FAD may lack a known family history or other indications for suspecting FAD but might nonetheless be carriers of FAD mutations.

Eye hand coordination in children with cerebral palsy.

Reaching to grasp an object of interest requires complex sensorimotor coordination involving eye, head, hand and trunk. While numerous studies have demonstrated deficits in each of these systems individually, little is known about how children with cerebral palsy (CP) coordinate multiple motor systems for functional tasks. Here we used kinematics, remote eye tracking and a trunk support device to examine the functional coupling of the eye, head and hand and the extent to which it was constrained by trunk postural control in 10 children with CP (6-16 years).