Luisa Jurjanz

Overgenerality of Autobiographical Memory in People with Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Alzheimer's Disease

Episodic autobiographical memory (ABM) is important for social functioning. Loss of specificity in ABM retrieval has been observed in people with mild to moderate Alzheimers disease (AD). Our aim was to extend these findings to subjects with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and very early AD. We performed a cued ABM task with both subject groups and healthy elderly controls. Although aMCI participants performed better than early AD subjects both showed reduced specificity of ABM retrieval when compared with controls. We conclude that qualitative memory retrieval deficits could contribute to social functioning impairment in people with aMCI and early AD, and highlight the complexity of symptoms already present in early stages of cognitive impairment.

Age and the Neural Network of Personal Familiarity

Background Accessing information that defines personally familiar context in real-world situations is essential for the social interactions and the independent functioning of an individual. Personal familiarity is associated with the availability of semantic and episodic information as well as the emotional meaningfulness surrounding a stimulus. These features are known to be associated with neural activity in distinct brain regions across different stimulus conditions (e.g., when perceiving faces, voices, places, objects), which may reflect a shared neural basis. Although perceiving context-rich personal familiarity may appear unchanged in aging on the behavioral level, it has not yet been studied whether this can be supported by neuroimaging data. Methodology/Principal Findings We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural network associated with personal familiarity during the perception of personally familiar faces and places. Twelve young and twelve elderly cognitively healthy subjects participated in the study. Both age groups showed a similar activation pattern underlying personal familiarity, predominantly in anterior cingulate and posterior cingulate cortices, irrespective of the stimulus type. The young subjects, but not the elderly subjects demonstrated an additional anterior cingulate deactivation when perceiving unfamiliar stimuli. Conclusions/Significance Although we found evidence for an age-dependent reduction in frontal cortical deactivation, our data show that there is a stimulus-independent neural network associated with personal familiarity of faces and places, which is less susceptible to aging-related changes.

Functional Imaging During Recognition of Personally Familiar Faces and Places in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimers disease (AD) patients show better everyday functioning in a familiar setting, but they have a reduced ability to access contextual details and episodes associated with a familiar person or environment. This suggests a dysfunction in the neural networks associated with stimulus identification. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the neural activity during the recognition of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces and places among AD patients and elderly controls. We did not find a group difference in the neural activity within brain areas important for perceptual familiarity recognition. Patients showed reduced activation for familiar stimuli in prefrontal brain areas known to be important for retrieving contextual information for a stimulus when compared with controls. These changes may contribute to how AD patients experience a personally familiar face or place.

Effektivität einer optimierten Ergotherapie bei Demenz im häuslichen Setting (ERGODEM)

In einer randomisierten und kontrollierten Studie wird die Wirksamkeit einer optimierten Ergotherapie im hauslichen Setting bei Patienten (Alter: > 55 Jahre) mit leichten und mittelschweren Demenzen im Vergleich zu einer TAU-Behandlung untersucht. Insgesamt werden 200 Patienten in die Studie eingeschlossen. Primares Ziel ist die Untersuchung individuell ausgefuhrter Alltagsaktivitaten, die mit den Patienten und pflegenden Angehorigen als wichtig identifiziert werden. Sekundare Outcomevariablen umfassen die kognitive Leistungsfahigkeit, Verhaltensauffalligkeiten, Lebenszufriedenheit der Betroffenen und ihrer pflegenden Angehorigen sowie Behandlungskosten. In der experimentellen Intervention wird, unter Einbeziehung der Angehorigen, eine umfassende ergotherapeutische Befunderhebung, eine patientenzentrierte Befund- und Zielklarung mittels COPM und eine darauf aufbauende ergotherapeutische Behandlung uber einen Zeitraum von sechs Wochen (a 12 Sitzungen) mit dem Patienten und seinem pflegenden Angehorigen dur...