Efficacy of Cognitive Rehabilitation Versus Usual Treatment at Home in Patients With Early Stages of Alzheimer Disease.

Introduction: Assessing the benefit of cognitive rehabilitation (CR) remains difficult.

Method: An observational study was conducted in 33 patients with early-stage Alzheimer disease and their caregiver included in a clinical CR program at home, compared to 17 patients who received usual treatment. Evaluation of patient's dependence and objective and subjective caregiver's burden was performed by the caregiver with a research tool focusing on impairment in daily activities related to cognitive deficits.

Alzheimer's disease patients activate attention networks in a short-term memory task.

Network functioning during cognitive tasks is of major interest in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Cognitive functioning in AD includes variable performance in short-term memory (STM). In most studies, the verbal STM functioning in AD patients has been interpreted within the phonological loop subsystem of Baddeley's working memory model.

Effects of aging on task- and stimulus-related cerebral attention networks.

Interactions between a dorsal attention network (DAN) and a ventral attention cerebral network (VAN) have been reported in young participants during attention or short-term memory (STM) tasks. Because it remains an underinvestigated question, age effects on DAN and VAN activity and their functional balance were explored during performance of an STM task. Older and younger groups showed similar behavioral patterns of results.

Recognition of personally familiar faces and functional connectivity in Alzheimer's disease.

Studies have reported that patients in the severe stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) experience difficulties recognizing their own faces in recent photographs. Two case reports of late-stage AD showed that this loss of self-face recognition was temporally graded: photographs from the remote past were recognized more easily than more recent photographs. Little is known about the neural correlates of own face recognition abilities in AD patients, while neuroimaging studies in healthy adults have related these abilities to a bilateral fronto-parieto-occipital network.