View clinical trials related to Cognitive Dysfunction.
Filter by:Efforts to find treatments for AD have yielded only modest benefits, likely because longstanding AD pathological processes induce irreversible neurological compromise. These processes begin years before the onset of clinical symptoms. This possibility has been incorporated into a model describing stages of AD development, articulated by the NIA/Alzheimer's Association preclinical workgroup of which the Co-Director of the Kulynych Alzheimer's Research Center, Dr. Suzanne Craft, was a member. According to this model, the best hope for countermanding the effects of AD lies in intervening at the earliest possible point in the pathological cascade. There are several important ongoing efforts in adults with preclinical AD that directly target amyloid aggregation. Although this strategy addresses an important aspect of the AD pathological cascade, we believe that addressing metabolic dysfunction affecting glucose and insulin regulation offers a complementary approach, in that it may reduce amyloid burden and toxicity, while also directly enhancing synaptic health, brain metabolism, tau regulation and neurovascular function. The purpose of the ADCC is to identify and characterize early risk factors that predict cognitive decline and dementia in asymptomatic adults and adults with early signs of cognitive impairment. The data obtained from this study, collected at enrollment and follow-up will allow us to examine disease trajectory in individuals with and without prediabetes and other measures of glucoregulatory dysfunction in this process. The enrollees, who will be well-characterized with regard to cognitive and metabolic status through ADCC assessments, will provide an important resource for other local (institution) and national investigations. Data collected from participants enrolled in the ADCC will be stored indefinitely for future investigations.
Because of the lengthening of life expectancy, more and more people are concerned with the effects of aging on their mental faculties (e.g., memory decline) and with the possibility of getting Alzheimer's Disease (AD) or other forms of dementia. This increasing awareness of AD has already resulted in a growing demand for neuropsychological testing. AD's research also emphasizes the need for early screening to improve the prediction of the disease progression and the efficacy of any future therapy. Such a drive to screen for pre-dementia raises the challenging issue of frontline identification of individuals in the preclinical or early clinical stages of AD. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is typically considered to be the prodromal state of AD, and is therefore at the core of the drive for early screening. Moreover, Pre-MCI so called SCI (Subjective Cognitive Impairment) can precede AD for 15 years. However, many individuals diagnosed with MCI do not convert to AD, some remaining stable and others even reversing back to normal (with rates of reversion to normal varying from 4.5% to as high as 53%). This over-diagnosis bias, which has been largely overlooked, is at the core of the present project at the interface of human and life sciences. Here, we argue that an important source of overdiagnosis in the prodromal state of AD comes from negative aging stereotypes (e.g., the culturally shared beliefs that aging inescapably causes severe cognitive decline and diseases such as AD) that permeate neuropsychological screening. There is ample evidence in the laboratory that such stereotypes contribute to the differences observed in the healthy population between younger and older adults in explicit memory tasks. Additionally, three pilot (lab) studies specifically conducted for the present ANR project showed that the threat of being judged stereotypically undermines the controlled use of memory of healthy older adults and simultaneously intensifies their automatic response tendencies, resulting in impaired memory performance. The present proposal goes several steps further by examining for the first time whether aging stereotypes are powerful enough to implicitly permeate the clinical neuropsychological testing and thus inflate memory deficits in older adults judged "at risk" (based on either epidemiological criteria or memory complaints), resulting in false-positive detection of SCI and MCI. This provocative hypothesis will be tested while 1) using biomarkers of neurodegeneration to distinguish false-positives from true MCI, and 2) using biomarkers of stress to examine whether and how aging stereotypes can lead to acute physiological stress during neuropsychological testing. This innovative project has the potential to offer new recommendations to improve the diagnosis accuracy of prodromal state of AD, with positive consequences for older people's wellbeing.
This study will perform a targeted metabolic analysis in blood and urine samples from subjects attending the Baylor AT&T Memory Center. The aim is to identify novel biomarkers that can distinguish normal aging subjects with no cognitive impairment from those with mild, moderate or severe cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer's disease. Subjects will also be screened for B-vitamin deficiencies that may correlate with other metabolic biomarkers and Alzheimer's disease.
This study evaluates the efficacy and mechanism of internet-based cognitive control training on episodic memory function in patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment(aMCI). Half of participants will receive adaptive internet-based cognitive control training program, while the other half will receive a fixed, primary difficulty level task.
This study evaluates the effects of "computerized cognitive training" and "cognitive training plus exercise training" on different cognitive domains in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients. Patients will be randomized into the computerized training group, cognitive training plus exercise training group and the control group.
Epilepsy affects between 0.5 and 0.7% of the European population. Despite the availability of numerous drug treatments, one third of patients still have seizures, which are associated with significant cognitive and social complications and excess mortality. In these patients, surgical treatment to remove the epileptogenic zone (EZ), the region of the brain responsible for seizures, is the only approach that can allow control of the disease. However, before investigating this surgery, investigations have to answer two questions: (i) what is the location and extension of the EZ and (ii) what functional risks, both motor and cognitive, would represent the resection of this Cortical region? As it is a functional surgery, it is in fact inconceivable that the surgery will result in an over-handicap. For these reasons, all candidates for surgery benefit from a complete assessment including imaging examinations, a neuropsychological assessment and a long-term video-EEG recording to record seizures. Nevertheless, in some patients, this assessment does not give us a formal answer. In these subjects, it is then necessary to carry out a second step, consisting of an invasive exploration by implantation of intracerebral electrodes during a stereoencephalography (SEEG). Due to its temporal and spatial resolution, the SEEG allows, besides the precise determination of the EZ, to carry out a functional mapping of the cortical regions likely to be included in cortectomy. Conventionally, this mapping is carried out on the basis of the cortical electrical stimulations applied to the implanted electrodes. If this approach is very robust for exploring primary functions such as motor skills or language, it cannot be used to evaluate more complex cognitive tasks such as face recognition or attention Effective cognitive treatment on a daily basis. This has led to the development in recent years, in Lyon and Grenoble, of a complementary approach to cerebral stimulation: dynamic spectral imaging (ISD). Numerous experimental paradigms have demonstrated that the realization of a cognitive task associates with the generation within the cortical regions involved in its treatment of a particular cortical activity. This activity is characterized by oscillations of the cortical rhythm in high frequencies (> 30 Hz), called gamma activities. The ISD thus consists in mapping this gamma activity during various cognitive tasks, thus making it possible to study more widely the complexity of the cognitive functions. Correlations between gamma activity and cognitive tasks have so far been exclusively performed in the non-epileptic cortex explored at the periphery of the EA during SEEG. Nevertheless, the cortical oscillatory pattern study associated with a specific cognitive task within the EZ could better anticipate complex cognitive deficits that could be generated by the resection of a cortical region. The main objective of this project is to establish the predictive character of the gamma cortical oscillatory pattern associated with a specific cognitive task on the risk of occurrence of a cognitive disorder after surgery of epilepsy.
This research aims to analyze the effects of senior dance on the cognition, frailty, and burden in elderly caregivers of rural communities. This is a randomized clinical trial to be conducted with a sample of 58 elderly caregivers residing in rural communities. Data collection will be performed in the homes of the elderly and/or in the dependencies of the Family Health units (USFs - primary health care systems). They will answer Socio-demographic characterization instrument, ACE-R Battery, and electroencephalography for cognitive evaluation, five Fragility criteria proposed by Fried et al and Zarit Burden Inventory. The dance protocol will be applied to the experimental group (n=29) in the USFs and the control group (n=29) will receive health care, including guidance on health care and practices. The protocols include 24 interventions, 60 minutes each, weekly, during 6 months. Analysis of effects comparisons will be conducted between groups and be comparing baseline with final measurements. Dance intervention is expected to exert important positive effects on all study variables (cognitive performance, fragility assessment, and caregiver burden), compared to the group. The intervention of the control group is expected to exert positive effects on some variables of the study (mainly, caregiver burden).
Surgery to the shoulder may be performed with patients seated upright in a position known as the "Beach Chair Position (BCP)." This position has certain advantages compared to alternative surgical positions (e.g. side lying) in some situations. However, it has been found that surgery in the BCP can temporarily decrease the amount of oxygen in the brain as a result of the combined effects of gravity and anaesthesia. This can result in complications following surgery such as some memory loss and confusion. Rarely, more serious complications have been reported in the past including death and stroke. Due to these reported complications the use of "cerebral oximetry" during shoulder surgery in the BCP has become more common. Before and during surgery, a monitor placed on the patients forehead measures the amount of oxygen present in the brain to help control this to an acceptable level. A number of monitors are now commercially available. Two monitors are commonly discussed in the literature; the INVOS™ 5100 and the FORE-SIGHT® machines. However, the actual relationship between the supply of oxygen to the brain during surgery and the chance of later developing problems with memory and thinking (known as "post operative cognitive decline" - POCD) is not clear. It is also not known if one monitor is more accurate than another at predicting these complications. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to examine the relationship between cerebral oxygen levels during shoulder surgery and the incidence of POCD (i.e. problems with memory and thinking). A second aim is to compare the INVOS™ 5100 and FORE-SIGHT® monitors ability to measure cerebral oxygen and cerebral desaturation events (CDEs) as well as the importance of other key clinical variables (e.g. blood pressure, nausea, body fat etc).
As individuals grow older, a number of factors can reduce our cognitive (or thinking) abilities such as "normal" aging, neurodegenerative diseases, and cardiovascular disease. This study will evaluate whether cognitive rehabilitation and transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) can improve cognitive abilities. Cognitive rehabilitation refers to methods that are used to improve tasks people have trouble doing in everyday life. Transcranial electrical stimulation uses small amounts of electricity to try to alter brain functioning. These approaches may help improve cognitive abilities like attention, learning, memory, finding words, and problem solving as well as everyday functioning. The goal of this study is to identify how to best use these methods, either alone or in combination.
Parkinson's disease (PD) has been classically regarded as a "movement disorder", so earlier work has focused on treating motor symptoms only. As PD patients now have longer life expectancy, the relatively slowly progressing cognitive deficits (compared to their motor deficits) have become one of the major challenges. Approximately 80% of PD patients eventually become demented. Therefore cognitive dysfunction is one of the most significant factors affecting the quality of life of patients with PD. While dementia in Parkinson's disease is routinely treated by cholinesterase inhibitors (e.g., donepezil and rivastigmine), their efficacy on mild cognitive impairment found in non-demented PD is questionable. Alternative approaches have been proposed including transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) but no consensus has been reached. This can be attributed mainly to: (1) imprecise knowledge of the underlying functional circuitry mediating this disease manifestation and (2) inter-individual variability. Here, the investigators will utilize a novel personalized network analysis approach to elucidate on the underlying mechanisms of the effect of tDCS on cognitive dysfunction in non-demented PD patients. It has been well documented that the caudate nucleus plays an important role in cognitive dysfunction found in PD. In the investigators' preliminary resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, they have shown that the connectivity of the right caudate nucleus is correlated to cognitive status of PD patients measured by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). The investigators hypothesize that tDCS on the left and/or right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may restore the functional connectivity of the right caudate nucleus which may in turn improve patients' cognitive performance.