117,591 research outputs found
Changes in the characteristics of Alzheimer patients at the first visit in centers for dementia: a 10-year follow-up study
No full textBackground and aims: The Cronos project is an observational study on the Alzheimer's disease (AD), created by Italy's Ministry of Public Health in 2000. The aim of our study is to evaluate if clinical characteristics at the first visit of patients recruited in UVA (Alzheimer Evaluation Unit) have changed from September 2000 to December 2009, and to investigate the possible reasons for this evolution. Methods: 1532 consecutive patients have been enrolled in two different UVAs (September, 2000 through to December, 2009) in a retrospective, descriptive study, employing medical record as the primary source of data. Results: Patients' age at the first visit was not different throughout the period of observation. No differences have been observed with regards to education and functional characteristics too. However, a reduction of severity of cognitive impairment has been found during the period of evaluation; patients consecutively recruited in the first years were more cognitively, functionally, and psycho behaviourally compromised than patients recruited in the following years observed. Conclusions: Data show a change of the characteristics at the first visit in patients affected by cognitive deterioration during the years of observation. This finding indicates new clinical needs of patients, requiring a change in pharmacological treatments and in general of the clinical approach
Impaired financial abilities in mild cognitive impairment: a direct assessment approach.
No full textVascular risk factors for VaD and AD in a population-based prospective cohort. The PAQUID study
No full textDivergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review
No full textA large number of studies, including single case and case series studies, have shown that patients with different types of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are characterized by the emergence of artistic abilities. This led to the hypothesis of enhanced creative thinking skills as a function of these pathological conditions. However, in the last years, it has been argued that these brain pathologies lead only to an augmented “drive to produce” rather than to the emergence of creativity. Moreover, only a few studies analyzed specific creative skills, such as divergent thinking (DT), by standardized tests. This Mini-Review aimed to examine the extent to which DT abilities are preserved in patients affected by FTD. Results showed that DT abilities (both verbal and figural) are altered in different ways according to the specific anatomical and functional changes associated with the diverse forms of FTD. On the one hand, patients affected by the behavioral form of FTD can produce many ideas because of unimpaired access to memory stores (i.e., episodic and semantic), but are not able to recombine flexibly the information to produce original ideas because of damages in the pre-frontal cortex. On the other hand, patients affected by the semantic variant are impaired also in terms of fluency because of the degradation of their semantic memory store. Potential implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Square Dancing with the Stars to Enhance Dynamic Hirschman Linkages?
No full textIn this Presidential Address, the author takes the reader on a reconnaissance of his life and time as a regional scientist. He points out scenery he found scintillating along the way, hoping that some may pick up the banner and chew on a few of the ideas for a while. He suggests a revisit to Albert O. Hirschman’s notion of key sectors and more empirical analysis related to Marcus Berliant’s and Masahisa Fujita’s notion of knowledge creation and transfer.Presidential Address, San Antonio, Texas, March 29, 2014 (53rd Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association
- …
