Are spatial tasks useful for the early diagnosis of Alzheimers disease - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 15
About This Presentation
Title:

Are spatial tasks useful for the early diagnosis of Alzheimers disease

Description:

A bit about my research interests in the field of dementia ... Anomia, impaired comprehension & loss of semantic knowledge, progresses to mutism ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:38
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 16
Provided by: andy138
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Are spatial tasks useful for the early diagnosis of Alzheimers disease


1
Are spatial tasks useful for the early diagnosis
of Alzheimers disease
2
Talk Overview
  • A bit about my research interests in the field of
    dementia
  • Current research on use of spatial measures for
    diagnosis of dementia
  • Ideas for extending this research over the next
    few years

3
Frontotemporal Dementia
  • Semantic dementia (progressive fluent aphasia)
  • Anomia, impaired comprehension loss of semantic
    knowledge, progresses to mutism
  • Frontal variant FTD
  • Changes in personality and social behaviour (lack
    of emphathy, increased risk-taking, poor social
    understanding)

4
Semantic dementia
  • Organisation of semantic memory and its
    relationship to language, perception and episodic
    memory (study breakdown of conceptual knowledge)
  • Visual and verbal memory in semantic dementia,
    and implications for relearning of names and
    associated conceptual knowledge (Graham et al.,
    2001 2002 Dewar et al., in press)
  • Colour knowledge in semantic dementia (Rogers et
    al., 2007)
  • Letter-by-letter reading in semantic dementia
    (Cumming et al., 2006)

5
Colour knowledge
6
Theoretical model
7
Alzheimers disease
  • Profiles of memory impairment in Alzheimers
    disease, and how to map cognitive impairments
    onto early brain changes development of
    sensitive measures for early diagnosis
  • Impairment in episodic memory (Simons et al.,
    2000 Scahill et al., 2005)
  • Spatial memory and discrimination (Lee et al.,
    2006 2007)
  • Multidimensional measures for early diagnosis
    (Dudas et al., 2005 Clague et al., 2005) - tests
    of people naming, position identification and
    recognition memory

8
Recognition Memory
9
Oddity judgement
1.00
Semantic dementia
Alzheimers disease
0.85
Controls
0.70
mean correct
0.55
0.40
0.25
Faces
Scenes
Oddity judgement
Lee et al (2006)
10
Current Research (Study 1)
  • Testing the sensitivity of spatial tests of
    memory and discrimination in early diagnosis of
    Alzheimers disease (being able to tell apart
    worried well from at high risk)
  • In collaboration with Tony Bayer (Geriatric
    Medicine)
  • Involves identifying cases at an early stage of
    disease (MMSE 28-30)
  • Testing performance of these individuals on a
    standard neuropsychological battery, and then an
    experimental battery of spatial tasks
  • Longitudinal follow-up of individuals to
    determine the usefulness of the tests in the
    clinic

11
Current Research (Study 2)
  • Attempting to link the cognitive impairments seen
    early on in Alzheimers disease with early
    structural and functional brain changes using
    fMRI
  • Tony Bayer (Geriatric Medicine) and Derek Jones
    (CUBRIC)
  • Subset of the cases from Study 1 in two fMRI
    studies
  • Oddity judgement with a recognition memory
    component (faces, objects and scenes)
  • Semantic knowledge of famous people (sensitive
    early in AD, Thompson et al., 2002)
  • Obtain high quality structural data (diffusion
    tensor imaging - allows modeling of the integrity
    of white matter tracts) and measure BOLD signal
    in key brain regions implicated early in
    Alzheimers disease
  • Why is this interesting??

12
Posterior cingulate involvement in MCI
Nestor et al (2003) Pengas et al (2008)
13
Parallels across imaging
Scene Memory Taylor et al (2007)
Scene Oddity Lee et al (2008)
FDG-PET in MCI Nestor et al (2003)
14
Future plans
  • Neuroimaging and behavioural studies of the same
    tasks in individuals identifiable high risk of
    Alzheimers disease (ApoE, family history etc.),
    and in other types of dementia (semantic
    dementia)
  • Link this work to other potential biomarkers of
    early dementia (convergence and divergence) -
    genetic predispositions, proteins.
  • Better understanding variability in the normal
    aged population on these tasks to gain a better
    feel for what is pathological or not.
  • Explore potential links between animal studies of
    AD and the clinical work (both neurosychology/neur
    oimaging) there is a real opportunity to test
    key new proposals about the genesis of pathology
    in AD in humans (posterior cingulate) in animals,
    with similar types of tasks

15
AD vs FvFTD
A. Graham, Hodges K. Graham (unpublished data)
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com