BrainBlog

Subjective Cognitive Complaints of Older Adults at the Population Level: An Item Response Theory Analysis Alzheimers Disease and Associated Disorders. 2011 Dec 20; Snitz BE, Yu L, Crane PK, Chang CC, Hughes TF, Ganguli M Abstract Subjective cognitive complaints (SCCs) are increasingly a focus in studies on prodromal Alzheimer disease (AD) and risk for dementia. Little is known about the optimal approach to measure SCCs. We used item response theory (IRT) to examine the characteristics of 24 SCC items in a sample of 3495 older adults pooled from 4 community-based studies. We investigated the potential advantages of IRT scoring over conventional scoring on the basis of participants' item response patterns. Items most likely endorsed by individuals low in SCC severity relate to word retrieval and general subjective memory decline. Items likely endorsed only by individuals high in SCC severity relate to nonepisodic memory changes, such as decline in comprehension, judgment and executi...

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2011 Meet Your Brain Homepage Guardian article about the lectures: Read full article here

The BBC's "Newspod" podcast from the 22nd of December includes an item looking at contemporary issues in performing pharma clinical trials in England. Comparison is made to what is considered to be the more-successful Scotland model. Approx 7 minutes into the podcast; lasting several minutes.

UI College of Law to hold colloquium on aging population 5:23 PM, Dec. 21, 2011 press-citizen.com [snip] "The 13 weekly sessions start Jan. 12 and will be available online to the public through live-streaming and podcasts, law professor and organizer Josephine Gittler said. Nationally-recognized experts in the field of public policy and aging, including Charles Sabatino, director of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging; Robert Egge, vice president of public policy and advocacy for the Alzheimer’s Association, and Daniel Marson, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will attend some of the sessions." [snip] Read the full article

Executive deficits are related to the inferior frontal junction in early dementia Brain. 2011 Dec 19; Schroeter ML, Vogt B, Frisch S, Becker G, Barthel H, Mueller K, Villringer A, Sabri O Access article here

Measuring Alzheimer disease progression with transition probabilities: Estimates from NACC-UDS Curr Alzheimer Res. 2011 Nov 28; Spackman DE, Kadiyala S, Neumann PJ, Veenstra DL, Sullivan SD Abstract Objectives: Estimate the probabilities, for Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, of transitioning between stages of disease severity (mild, moderate, severe, dead) and care settings (community, institutional). Methods: Data were compiled by the National Alzheimer Coordinating Center. The main analyses were limited to 3,852 patients who were >50 years old, diagnosed with possible/probable AD and had at least two center visits. A multinomial logistic model accounting for patient and center level correlation was used to calculate transition probabilities between stages of the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR). Separately we calculated the probabilities of being institutionalized based on CDR stage. Both analyses controlled for baseline age, time between visits, sex, marital status, whether ...

The cognitive impact of antiepileptic drugs Ther Adv Neurol Disord. 2011 Nov; 4(6): 385-407 Eddy CM, Rickards HE, Cavanna AE Abstract Effective treatment of epilepsy depends on medication compliance across a lifetime, and studies indicate that drug tolerability is a significant limiting factor in medication maintenance. Available antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) have the potential to exert detrimental effects on cognitive function and therefore compromise patient wellbeing. On the other hand, some agents may serve to enhance cognitive function. In this review paper, we highlight the range of effects on cognition linked to a variety of newer and older AEDs, encompassing key alterations in both specific executive abilities and broader neuropsychological functions. Importantly, the data reviewed suggest that the effects exerted by an AED could vary depending on both patient characteristics and drug-related variables. However, there are considerable difficulties in evaluating the available evid...

Role of Neuropsychologists in the Evaluation and Management of Sport-related Concussion: An Inter-Organization Position Statement Clin Neuropsychol. 2011 Nov; 25(8): 1289-1294 Echemendia RJ, Iverson GL, McCrea M, Broshek DK, Gioia GA, Sautter SW, Macciocchi SN, Barr WB Abstract Over the past 20 years, clinical neuropsychologists have been at the forefront of both scientific and clinical initiatives aimed at developing evidence-based approaches to the evaluation and management of sport-related concussion. These efforts have directly impacted current policy on strategies for injury assessment and return-to-play by athletes after concussion. Many states are considering legislation requiring (a) education of athletes, parents, coaches, and school/organization officials on the recognition, evaluation, and management of sport-related concussions; (b) removal from play of any youth athlete that is suspected of having sustained a concussion; and (c) not allowing the student to return to parti...

From the MindHacks blog, with a link to the piece in The Economist : The crowd dynamics of the city safari 18 December 2011 Read the blog post

An interesting read. I always aimed for 6th-grade reading level myself, so it surprised me to read of this finding: Informed Consent Forms Target 11th Grade Readers By Ed Silverman Pharmalot December 12th, 2011 // 9:29 am Read the full blog post

From last Sunday's New York Times Sunday Magazine : A Drug That Wakes the Near Dead By JENEEN INTERLANDI 04 December 2011 "A surprising drug has brought a kind of consciousness to patients once considered vegetative — and changed the debate over pulling the plug." Read the article

Balkanizing the primate orbitofrontal cortex: distinct subregions for comparing and contrasting values Annals of the New York Academy of Science. 2011 Dec; 1239(1): 1-13 Rudebeck PH, Murray EA Abstract The primate orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is often treated as a single entity, but architectonic and connectional neuroanatomy indicate that it has distinguishable parts. Nevertheless, few studies have attempted to dissociate the functions of its subregions. Here we review findings from recent neuropsychological and neurophysiological studies that do so. The lateral OFC seems to be important for learning, representing, and updating specific object-reward associations. The medial OFC seems to be important for value comparisons and choosing among objects on that basis. Rather than viewing this dissociation of function in terms of learning versus choosing, however, we suggest that it reflects the distinction between contrasts and comparisons: differences versus similarities. Making use of high...

Read the In The Pipeline blog entry (06 December 2011).

From Bloomberg : Eli Lilly Shares Rise on Alzheimer’s Drug Hopes By Drew Armstrong and Robert Langreth Dec 6, 2011 [snip] "Solanezumab is an antibody designed to clear protein fragments called beta amyloid that clutter the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Pfizer Inc. (PFE), Johnson & Johnson and Elan are testing bapineuzumab, a similar drug." [snip] Read the article

From Drug Discovery & Development : Positive Study Results for Schizophrenia Drug Drug Discovery & Development December 05, 2011 "EnVivo Pharmaceuticals announced the analysis of a completed Phase 2b clinical trial of EVP-6124, a novel, orally bioavailable nicotinic alpha-7 agonist, in schizophrenia." Read the full report

Narrative accounts like this are not common, but still excellent reading for students of neuropsychology: A Mind "Surrounded by a Moat": A First-person Account of Cognitive Impairment in Multiple Sclerosis Cogn Behav Neurol . 2011 Nov 29; Anonymous , Stern EB Abstract This is a first-person account of the cognitive impairments-in speaking, writing, and thinking-caused by multiple sclerosis in a professional writer. The patient explains how she has worked around her deficits in rebuilding her life over the 18 years since her diagnosis. Her personal account is woven together with her clinical history, including her neuropsychological testing and magnetic resonance imaging results. A companion article giving perspectives on the case was written by a cognitive neuroscientist who has been studying some of the types of deficits reported by the patient. PMID: 22134193 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

The 20th Jean-Louis Signoret Neuropsychology Prize of the Fondation Ipsen is Awarded to Prof. Patricia K. Kuhl (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 2, 2011 - The international jury under the presidency of Prof. Albert Galaburda (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA) awarded on November 29th, 2011 the 20th Jean-Louis Signoret Neuropsychology Prize of the Fondation Ipsen (Paris:IPN) (20.000€) to Prof. Prof. Patricia K. Kuhl (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) for her work that played a major role in the understanding of language acquisition and the neural bases of language. Infants are born with innate abilities to easily identify every sound of every language, however, by the end of the first year of life, infants show a perceptual narrowing of their language skills. Their ability to discern differences in the sounds that make up words in the world’s languages shrinks. Nonnative sounds are no longer differentiated. This developmental transition is cau...

Hippocampal hyperactivation associated with cortical thinning in Alzheimer's disease signature regions in non-demented elderly adults Journal of Neuroscience. 2011 Nov 30; 31(48): 17680-17688 Putcha D, Brickhouse M, O'Keefe K, Sullivan C, Rentz D, Marshall G, Dickerson B, Sperling R Abstract Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with functional and structural alterations in a distributed network of brain regions supporting memory and other cognitive domains. Functional abnormalities are present in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with evidence of early hyperactivity in medial temporal lobe regions, followed by failure of hippocampal activation as dementia develops. Atrophy in a consistent set of cortical regions, the "cortical signature of AD," has been reported at the stage of dementia, MCI, and even in clinically normal (CN) older individuals predicted to develop AD. Despite multiple lines of evidence for each of these findings, the relationship between this st...