Treating deficits in emotion perception following traumatic brain injury

The present research aimed to investigate whether social perception deficits commonly experienced in the adult traumatic brain injury (TBI) population can be successfully remediated through cognitive rehabilitation. Twelve outpatient volunteers (11 male, 1 female; age range 20-57 years) with severe, chronic TBI (mean length of post-traumatic amnesia 121 days, range 58-210 days; mean months post- injury 93.58, range 17-207 months) participated in a randomised controlled trial. Participants were randomly allocated to treatment and waitlist control groups following assessment on a range of emotion perception and psychosocial measures. Treatment comprised 25 hours, across 8 weeks, of a programme specifically designed to address emotion perception which incorporated a variety of remediation techniques shown to be effective with the TBI population. Results indicated that participants significantly improved both in judging basic emotional stimuli when presented in a naturalistic format (i.e., video vignettes) and in making social inferences on the basis of speaker demeanour. This is the first known treatment study dealing with emotion perception deficits in individuals with TBI.

Therapy-induced plasticity of cognitive functions in MS patients: insights from fMRI

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system whose pathological mechanisms are still not completely understood. Physical as well as cognitive deterioration are consequences within the disease process that have an extensive impact on the patient's quality of life. Therefore, understanding the functional background of spontaneous as well as induced remission is of high relevance. Studies on visualization of therapeutic effects of pharmacological or cognitive treatment by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are still rare. From fMRI studies on focal brain lesions hypotheses on mechanisms of brain reorganization can be derived. This contribution will first give an overview of the existing studies using fMRI in MS, on cognitive decline, on cognitive treatment studies and its therapeutic effects on behavioural readouts in MS, and on therapy-induced brain plasticity and its possible visualization by fMRI. Results of a study on correlating the effects of cognitive training with changes in brain organization in patients with mild to severe cognitive impairment will be reported.