View clinical trials related to Semantic Dementia.
Filter by:Memory and social interaction are intimately linked. On the one hand, social interaction is a privileged context for learning, and on the other hand, appropriate social interactions involve remembering the partners encountered and previous exchanges. People with Alzheimer's disease classic syndrome variant (AD) have a major impairment of episodic memory, while people with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (SPPA) are characterized by semantic disorders in the foreground, associated with changes in their social behavior with a tendency to egocentricity. In both cases, patients frequently have reduced social interactions. Although social interaction situations seem to constitute a privileged learning context, their effectiveness for patients with cognitive disorders must be evaluated and the conditions under which they are effective must be established. The main objective of this study is to determine whether social interaction constitutes a beneficial context for learning new information and whether the presence of social behavior disorders alters this benefit. More broadly, the goal is to better understand the mechanisms underlying the possible beneficial effect of learning in social contexts and to clarify the links between memory performance in different social contexts, cognitive disorders, social behavioral changes and personality traits. Finally, a description will be made of the brain substrates associated with memory performance obtained during learning in social contexts in order to investigate their particularities. Thirty couples each including a person with AD, 16 couples each including a person with SPPA and 46 couples of persons without cognitive complaints (HC), one of which will be matched in gender and age to one of the patients, will be included in the study. Participants will perform image location learning in a grid, in three social contexts in which both members of the couple are involved: 1) simple presence of others, 2) by observation and 3) in collaboration. A psychometric assessment including social cognition and classical tests assessing memory, and questionnaires concerning global executive functioning, social behavior and personality will be offered to all participants. Patients in the AD and SPPA groups and the matched individual in the HC group will undergo anatomical and functional brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The purpose of the study is to test the safety and tolerability of twice daily Verdiperstat in patients with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) due to frontotemporal lobar degeneration with TDP-43 pathology (FTLD-TDP). Three-fourths of the participants will receive Verdiperstat and one-fourth will receive Placebo during the 24-week treatment duration.
Within the spectrum of fronto-temporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) semantic dementia (SD) causes profound language dysfunction. SD damages semantic processing typically in the temporal poles (anterior temporal lobes, ATL). It is an early onset disease (often before 65 years of age) affecting about 4000 patients in France and for which no validated treatment is available. For several years a growing number of studies have explored the effects of transcranial stimulation (TCS) on aphasic patients following stroke. Several studies have targeted left-sided language areas and/or homotopical right-sided regions with excitatory or inhibitory TCS, respectively, according to the principle of inter-hemispheric inhibition. In addition, repetitive multi-day TCS has provided evidence for long-lasting language effects (>6 months) presumably linked to stimulation-induced neuroplasticity. Such investigations have provided promising results and have demonstrated that the stimulation site is a determining factor by showing that stimulation of cortical areas belonging to the language network usually results in more convincing effects than stimulating areas outside that network. Despite these findings the use of TCS in degenerative language diseases, such as primary progressive aphasias including SD, has only been explored in few small cohort studies and, surprisingly, they have not targeted language-related cortices. This project proposes the application of multi-day repetitive TCS with direct current (tDCS) in a large population of SD patients (N=60). It is built on a exploratory investigation of our team which has used three single tDCS sessions in a double-blind sham-controlled study. Excitatory and inhibitory tDCS to the left and right temporal pole, respectively, demonstrated highly significant transient effects (20 min) on semantic processing in 12 SD patients, providing 'proof of concept' and the rationale for this project. The aim here consists of using repetitive multi-day tDCS for a potential therapeutic outcome leading to long-lasting semantic improvement via neuroplasticity. The project is grounded on 2 hypotheses: i) tDCS to temporal poles (left-excitatory, right-inhibitory) reactivates semantic processing in SD, ii) repetitive tDCS during ten days could induce neuroplasticity and therapeutic language improvement.
The Swedish BioFINDER 2 study is a new study that will launch in 2017 and extends the previous cohorts of BioFINDER 1 study (www.biofinder.se). BioFINDER 1 is used e.g. to characterize the role of beta-amyloid pathology in early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) using amyloid-PET (18F-Flutemetamol) and Aβ analysis in cerebrospinal fluid samples. The BioFINDER 1 study has resulted in more than 40 publications during the last three years, many in high impact journals, and some the of the results have already had important implications for the diagnostic work-up patients with AD in the clinical routine practice. The original BioFINDER 1 cohort started to include participants in 2008. Since then there has been a rapid development of biochemical and neuroimaging technologies which enable novel ways to the study biological processes involved in Alzheimer's disease in living people. There has also been a growing interest in the earliest stages of AD and other neurodegenerative diseases. With the advent of new tau-PET tracers there is now an opportunity to elucidate the role of tau pathology in the pathogenesis of AD and other tauopathies. The Swedish BioFINDER 2 study has been designed to complement the BioFINDER 1 study and to e.g. address issues regarding the role of tau pathology in different dementias and in preclinical stages of different dementia diseases. Further, the clinical assessments and MRI methods have been further optimized compared to BioFINDER 1.
To establish diagnostic tools to make an accurate clinical and pathological diagnosis of patients with clinical FTLD syndromes