We often estimate an unknown value based on available relevant information, a process known as cognitive estimation. In this study, we assess the cognitive and neuroanatomic basis for quantitative estimation by examining deficits in patients with focal neurodegenerative disease in frontal and parietal cortex. Executive function and number knowledge are key components in cognitive estimation. Prefrontal cortex has been implicated in multilevel reasoning and planning processes, and parietal cortex has been associated with number knowledge required for such estimations. We administered the Biber cognitive estimation test (BCET) to assess cognitive estimation in 22 patients with prefrontal disease due to behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), to 17 patients with parietal disease due to corticobasal syndrome (CBS) or posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) and 11 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Both bvFTD and CBS/PCA patients had significantly more difficulty with cognitive estimation than controls. MCI were not impaired on BCET relative to controls. Regression analyses related BCET performance to gray matter atrophy in right lateral prefrontal and orbital frontal cortices in bvFTD, and to atrophy in right inferior parietal cortex, right insula, and fusiform cortices in CBS/PCA. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that a frontal-parietal network plays a crucial role in cognitive estimation.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00317 | DOI Listing |
Behav Res Methods
December 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, P.zza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1, 20126, Milano, Italy.
Despite being largely spoken and studied by language and cognitive scientists, Italian lacks large resources of language processing data. The Italian Crowdsourcing Project (ICP) is a dataset of word recognition times and accuracy including responses to 130,465 words, which makes it the largest dataset of its kind item-wise. The data were collected in an online word knowledge task in which over 156,000 native speakers of Italian took part.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrials
December 2024
Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA.
Background: Vancomycin, an antibiotic with activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), is frequently included in empiric treatment for community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) despite the fact that MRSA is rarely implicated in CAP. Conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing on nasal swabs to identify the presence of MRSA colonization has been proposed as an antimicrobial stewardship intervention to reduce the use of vancomycin. Observational studies have shown reductions in vancomycin use after implementation of MRSA colonization testing, and this approach has been adopted by CAP guidelines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Psychiatry
December 2024
Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA.
Psychiatric disorders are highly comorbid, heritable, and genetically correlated [1-4]. The primary objective of cross-disorder psychiatric genetics research is to identify and characterize both the shared genetic factors that contribute to convergent disease etiologies and the unique genetic factors that distinguish between disorders [4, 5]. This information can illuminate the biological mechanisms underlying comorbid presentations of psychopathology, improve nosology and prediction of illness risk and trajectories, and aid the development of more effective and targeted interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Int
December 2024
ISGlobal, Barcelona, Spain; Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain; CIBER Epidemiología y Salud Pública (CIBERESP), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spain; Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology, Erasmus MC, University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; ICREA, Barcelona, Spain. Electronic address:
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View Article and Find Full Text PDFClin Nutr
December 2024
Department of Medical, Surgical and Health Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy; Geriatric Clinic, Maggiore University Hospital, Azienda Sanitaria Universitaria Giuliano Isontina (ASUGI), Trieste, Italy; School of Dietetics, University of Trieste - Pordenone branch, Pordenone, Italy.
Background & Aims: Malnutrition and cognitive impairment are among the major contributors to frailty, that significantly increases the risk of mortality of older hospitalized patients. Multidimensional frailty assessment tools, such as the multidimensional prognostic index-MPI, a tool based on a standard comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA), have proven valuable for predicting adverse outcomes, including mortality of older adults following acute illness but its application in everyday clinical practice is limited. We hypothesized that removing parameters not closely associated with mortality and sorting the patient population according to the presence or not of cognitive impairment with possible integration of common laboratory markers, could provide a simplified approach that could improve practicability in all settings with at least comparable 1-year mortality predictive value.
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