1,720,996 research outputs found
Valutazione neuropsicologica del paziente candidato al trattamento chirurgico della stenosi carotidea aterosclerotica
No full textUn caso clinico di diagnosi differenziale incerta tra malattia di Alzheimer e demenza a corpi di Lewy
No full textAutobiographical memory in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment
No full textAutobiographical memory (ABM) was evaluated in 19 patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) by means of the standardized enquiry developed by Borrini et al. (Psychol Med 19:215–224, 1989). Longitudinal assessments were carried out by re-testing participants at 9-month intervals up to three assessments over 18 months. Although aMCI patients performed significantly worse than age-, gender- and education-matched normal controls, all of them achieved above normal scores according to Italian norms. No evidence of disproportionate sparing of remote memories (i.e., classical temporal gradient, TG) was found. These findings contrast with the previously reported significant impairment of memory for public events (Bizzozero et al. in J Clin Exp Neuropsychol 31:48–56, 2009). Such a discrepancy might be attributed to the adopted ABM enquiry tapping “personal semantics”, presumed to rely largely on prefrontal functions, in contrast with the mainly episodic qualification of memory for past public events, which is mostly dependent on hippocampal structures. Our results also support the hypothesis that the contents of remote memory archives may be differentially affected in aMCI
Mirror asymmetry of category and letter fluency in traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer's patients
No full textIn this study we contrasted the Category fluency and Letter fluency performance of 198 normal subjects, 57 Alzheimer's patients and 57 patients affected by traumatic brain injury (TBI). The aim was to check whether, besides the prevalence of Category fluency deficit often reported among Alzheimer's patients, the TBI group presented the opposite dissociation. According to some recent claims, in fact, the deficit of TBI would be equally severe for both fluency types. The inquiry followed different approaches for data analysis, including the evaluation of a unique index (Fluency Type Index or FTI), independent of the overall fluency and aimed at expressing at individual subject level the relationship between Category and Letter fluency. The results confirmed that Alzheimer's patients are more defective on Category than Letter fluency, and also clearly indicated that an opposite pattern applies to TBI patients. TBI seems to cause a relatively more severe impairment of Letter than Category fluency, probably due to its impact on the frontal lobe structures. We discuss whether, on the basis of the statistical distribution of our data, it is worth considering as homogeneous populations broadly defined groups as Alzheimer's or TBI patients
The double dissociation between the knowledge of gestures and the actual object use. A study of two patients
No full textConcerning the debate about the relationship between gesture representation related to tools and semantic action knowledge, we focus our attention on the gesture concepts necessary for performing a skilled tool-use and on their possible nature, semantic versus presemantic. We present 14 patients who were examined for praxis abilities with our Apraxia Battery and discuss their performance related to most common cognitive model for praxis. 14 patients with different etiology (6 cortico-basal disease, 1 possible Alzheimer’s disease with atypical onset and 7 left hemispheric strokes) perform an Apraxia Battery composed of 8 tasks (semantic questionnaire, denomination task, verbal recognition tasks, utilization apraxia task, pantomime comprehension , gesture similarity judgment, functional-manipulation similarity judgment, and De Renzi’s imitation test for ideomotor apraxia). All the degenerative patients underwent to a general neuropsychological examination to assess the cognitive profile and the patients with stroke received the Token Test to assess the present of aphasia. Among all patient, we found two patient who present an opposite performance on GSJ task and the manipulation part of the FMSJ one. The patient A (CBD patient) and B (left thalamic stroke patient) performs normal in manipulation similarity judgment part, while shows difficulties in GSJ. On the other hand patient C (CBD patient) shows the opposite pattern (pathological performance in GSJ and preserved abilities in MSJ task. As we suppose, Gesture Similarity Judgment task examine the gesture representations through a semantic route by verbal modality, while the Manipulation Similarity Judgment task explores them though a direct visual modality. We believe that patient A and B present unimpaired gesture representations to a presemantic level, but show a possible deficit at semantic level or a interrupted link between action semantic knowledge and peripheral representations
Temporal gradients for media-mediated memory : Italian norms
No full textTemporal gradient (TG), i.e., differential recallof recent and old memories, is a well known feature ofamnesia. A recent study provided evidence of a classicalTG for media-mediated events in elderly healthy people,showing that they recall remote events significantly betterthan recent ones, while a reverse TG, i.e., better recall ofmore recent events, was demonstrated in younger normalsubjects. In the present study we present normative datawhich, using the same test, allow evaluation of TG in singlecases and their qualification as classical or reverse. Thenormative procedure was also applied to a small sample ofsubjects with probable Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitiveimpairment. Norms for TG may be helpful not only toassess healthy people's performance, but also to judge anyapparent TG in pathological subjects
Verbal Learning in frontal lobe lesion patients compared to normal subjects : a model-based approach
No full textTime ordering in frontal lobe patients: a stochastic model approach
No full textFrontal lobe patients reproduced a sequence of capital letters or abstract shapes. Immediate and delayed reproduction trials allowed the analysis of short- and long-term memory for time order by means of suitable Markov chain stochastic models. Patients were as proficient as healthy subjects on the immediate reproduction trial, thus showing spared encoding and short-term memory. They failed, instead, on the delayed trials with capital letters, but not with random shapes, suggesting that their long-term memory impairment did not depend on primary deficits for ordering, but on inability to benefit from the organisational strategies that improve the retention and retrieval in normal subjects. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
What type of visual information is contained in the Structural Description System? The contrast between categorical and analogical representations among patients with focal hemisphere lesions
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