BrainBlog

From The National Academies Of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Health and Medicine Division Board on Health Sciences Policy Committee on Preventing Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Preventing Cognitive Decline and Dementia: A Way Forward Released: June 22, 2017 Available here

As June is Aphasia Awareness Month, I note I recently submitted a chapter about aphasia to be published next year. Aphasia is the loss of acquired language abilities due to brain damage, such as stroke. Neuropsychologists are often called upon to determine the nature and severity of these changes to language functioning. My contribution is a biography of Dr. Katharine McBride, a psychologist working with neurologist Dr. Theodore Weisenburg from 1929 through 1934. They created the first comprehensive aphasia testing battery that was based on the triad of: the use of psychometric tests, tests were standardized in format and scoring, and test performances included the comparative results of performances by healthy adults. McBride’s enduring contribution to aphasia assessment remains all the more exceptional as she started her role in this clinical research whilst still a graduate student. Katharine McBride would leave psychological research to become the very successful fourth preside...

Dr. Peggy Mason reported on her blog and on twitter that she will debut a new version of her MOOC course later this year: Blog post The new course will follow closely the contents of the new edition of her textbook.

Isabelle Rapin, Who Advanced Concept of an Autism Spectrum, Dies at 89 By Richard Sandomir The New York Times 09 June 2017 Article

Brenda Milner, Eminent Brain Scientist, Is ‘Still Nosy’ at 98 by Benedict Carey The New York Times 15 May 2017 Article

This Open Access article is an informative read - Marshall A. Dalton, Peter Zeidman, Daniel N. Barry, Elaine Williams, Eleanor A. Maguire Segmenting subregions of the human hippocampus on structural magnetic resonance image scans: An illustrated tutorial Brain and Neuroscience Advances First published date: April-06-2017 10.1177/2398212817701448 A snippet from the Abstract - "The hippocampus plays a central role in cognition, and understanding the specific contributions of its subregions will likely be key to explaining its wide-ranging functions. However, delineating substructures within the human hippocampus in vivo from magnetic resonance image scans is fraught with difficulties. To our knowledge, the extant literature contains only brief descriptions of segmentation procedures used to delineate hippocampal subregions in magnetic resonance imaging/functional magnetic resonance imaging studies."

Gerald Goldstein, Ph.D., died last week at the age of 85 years. He was an influential presence in the practice of neuropsychology as a clinical domain and as a science. His career spanned over sixty years. Here is a link to a 2015 celebratory article from the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System about him: Neuropsychology Researcher Celebrates 60 Years .

A fine Editorial Commentary: Carson, A. (2017). Concussion, dementia and CTE: are we getting it very wrong? Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. Published Online First: 10 April 2017. doi: 10.1136/jnnp-2016-315510

The Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology takes place later this month. Conference Homepage

'People think I'm drunk but I have Parkinson's' By Lindsay Brown BBC Newsbeat reporter 10 April 2017 Read report here [snip] "Jordan was diagnosed with Parkinson's when he was 17 and says people often think he's had too much to drink." [snip]

A very interesting Open Access publication available today examining the impact of methylphenidate and cognitive functioning in patients with a traumatic brain injury: Manktelow, A. E., Menon, D. K., Sahakian, B. J., & Stamatakis, E. A. (2017). Working Memory after Traumatic Brain Injury: The Neural Basis of Improved Performance with Methylphenidate. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 11(58). doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00058

Beautiful work - Greg Dunn .

The February 2017 issue of Epilepsia has a fine critical review and invited commentary about the current state of AED drug development and clinical trials: Bialer, M. et al. (2017). Progress report on new antiepileptic drugs: A summary of the Thirteenth Eilat Conference on New Antiepileptic Drugs and Devises (EILAT XIII) . Epilepsia, 58(2), 181-221.

A second edition of Dr. Peggy Mason's excellent textbook was published earlier this month. She can be found on Twitter at @neuroMOOC and her MOOC course remains available at Coursera.

From PubMed: Bowler, R.M., Adams, S.W., Schwarzer, R, Gocheva, V.V., Roels, H.A., Kim, Y., Kircos, C.L., ... Lobdell, D.T. (2017). Validity of self-reported concentration and memory problems: Relationship with neuropsychological assessment and depression. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, doi: 10.1080/13803395.2017.1301392. [Epub ahead of print] BACKGROUND: This study investigated the validity of self-reported concentration and memory problems (CMP) in residents environmentally exposed to manganese (Mn). METHOD: Self-report of CMP from a health questionnaire (HQ) and the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) was compared to neuropsychological assessment (Trails A&B; Digit Span; Digit Symbol; Similarities; Auditory Consonant Trigrams, ACT; NAB Memory; Rey-Osterrieth, Rey-O, Delayed). Participants included 146 residents from Ohio exposed to air-Mn, with a modeled average concentration of 0.55 µg m(-)(3) (range = 0.01-4.58). RESULTS: Residents were prim...

From PubMed: Dragoy, O., Akinina, Y., & Dronkers, N. (2016). Toward a functional neuroanatomy of semantic aphasia: A history and ten new cases . Cortex. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2016.09.012 Almost 70 years ago, Alexander Luria incorporated semantic aphasia among his aphasia classifications by demonstrating that deficits in linking the logical relationships of words in a sentence could co-occur with non-linguistic disorders of calculation, spatial gnosis and praxis deficits. In line with his comprehensive approach to the assessment of language and other cognitive functions, he argued that deficits in understanding semantically reversible sentences and prepositional phrases, for example, were in line with a single neuropsychological factor of impaired spatial analysis and synthesis, since understanding such grammatical relationships would also draw on their spatial relationships. Critically, Luria demonstrated the neural underpinnings of this syndrome with the critical implicatio...

Wilder Penfield Digital Collection Wilder Penfield Digital Collection McGill University Library and Archives From the homepage: "This digital collection consists of a sample of materials selected from McGill University's Osler Library of the History of Medicine's Wilder Penfield Fonds, P142. The images, letters, and other records found here were chosen by the former director of the MNI and close friend of Penfield, Dr. William Feindel, for their significance in documenting both Penfield's life and the history of the Institute. This digitized selection contains material concerning his early life, family, and medical training, the establishment of the MNI, and elements of Penfield's medical research, as well as important peacetime and wartime research and treatment projects carried out by the MNI up until the 1980s."

There are several relevant academic conferences on the near horizon. American Neurological Association (ANA) Baltimore, MD 16-18 October National Academy of Neuropsychology (NAN) Seattle, WA 19-22 October Society for Neuroscience (SfN) San Diego, CA 16-16 November