Background: Cognitive deterioration is a core symptom of many neuropsychiatric disorders and target of increasing significance for novel treatment strategies. Hence, its reliable capture in long-term follow-up studies is prerequisite for recording the natural course of diseases and for estimating potential benefits of therapeutic interventions. Since repeated neuropsychological testing is required for respective longitudinal study designs, occurrence, time pattern and magnitude of practice effects on cognition have to be understood first under healthy good-performance conditions to enable design optimization and result interpretation in disease trials.
Methods: Healthy adults (N = 36; 47.3 ± 12.0 years; mean IQ 127.0 ± 14.1; 58% males) completed 7 testing sessions, distributed asymmetrically from high to low frequency, over 1 year (baseline, weeks 2-3, 6, 9, months 3, 6, 12). The neuropsychological test battery covered 6 major cognitive domains by several well-established tests each.
Results: Most tests exhibited a similar pattern upon repetition: (1) Clinically relevant practice effects during high-frequency testing until month 3 (Cohen's d 0.36-1.19), most pronounced early on, and (2) a performance plateau thereafter upon low-frequency testing. Few tests were non-susceptible to practice or limited by ceiling effects. Influence of confounding variables (age, IQ, personality) was minor.
Conclusions: Practice effects are prominent particularly in the early phase of high-frequency repetitive cognitive testing of healthy well-performing subjects. An optimal combination and timing of tests, as extractable from this study, will aid in controlling their impact. Moreover, normative data for serial testing may now be collected to assess normal learning curves as important comparative readout of pathological cognitive processes.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-11-118 | DOI Listing |
JMIR Form Res
January 2025
Smith School of Business, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Background: Depression significantly impacts an individual's thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and moods; this prevalent mental health condition affects millions globally. Traditional approaches to detecting and treating depression rely on questionnaires and personal interviews, which can be time consuming and potentially inefficient. As social media has permanently shifted the pattern of our daily communications, social media postings can offer new perspectives in understanding mental illness in individuals because they provide an unbiased exploration of their language use and behavioral patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Med Internet Res
January 2025
Department of Basic and Community Nursing, School of Nursing, Nanjing Medical University, NanJing, China.
Background: Telehealth interventions can effectively support caregivers of people with dementia by providing care and improving their health outcomes. However, to successfully translate research into clinical practice, the content and details of the interventions must be sufficiently reported in published papers.
Objective: This study aims to evaluate the completeness of a telehealth intervention reporting in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted for caregivers of people with dementia.
J Particip Med
January 2025
Division of Allergy & Pulmonary Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, United States.
Background: Adolescents and young adults (AYA) with cystic fibrosis (CF) are at risk for deviating from their daily treatment regimen due to significant time burden, complicated daily therapies, and life stressors. Developing patient-centric, effective, engaging, and practical behavioral interventions is vital to help sustain therapeutically meaningful self-management.
Objective: This study aimed to devise and refine a patient-centered telecoaching intervention to foster self-management in AYA with CF using a combination of intervention development approaches, including an evidence- and theory-based approach (ie, applying existing theories and research evidence for behavior change) and a target population-centered approach (ie, intervention refinement based on the perspectives and actions of those individuals who will use it).
Gac Med Mex
January 2025
Terminal 4 Communications, Hilversum, Netherlands.
Introduction: The transdermal patch is an effective contraceptive with advantages over other hormonal methods. However, the percentage of patch's users is 2.8 %.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActa Orthop
January 2025
Department of Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, Erasmus MC University Medical Centre Rotterdam; Department of General Practice, Erasmus MC University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Background And Purpose: For medial knee osteoarthritis (OA), operative and nonoperative treatment options are available. Two widely applied unloading therapies are a valgus unloader brace and a high tibial osteotomy (HTO). We aimed to compare the effects of a valgus unloader knee brace with an HTO on knee pain after 1 year in patients with symptomatic medial knee OA.
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