Emotional prosody recognition is impaired in Alzheimer’s disease

Alterations of human CSF and serum-based mitophagy biomarkers in the continuum of Alzheimer disease

Defective mitophagy is consistently found in postmortem brain and iPSC-derived neurons from Alzheimer disease (AD) patients. However, there is a lack of extensive examination of mitophagy status in serum or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and the clinical potential of mitophagy biomarkers has not been tested. We quantified biomarkers of mitophagy/autophagy and lysosomal degradation (PINK1, BNIP3L and TFEB) in CSF and serum from 246 individuals, covering mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD, n = 100), dementia due to AD (AD-dementia, n = 100), and cognitively unimpaired individuals (CU, n = 46), recruited from the Czech Brain Aging Study. Cognitive function and brain atrophy were also assessed. Our data show that serum and CSF PINK1 and serum BNIP3L were higher, and serum TFEB was lower in individuals with AD than in corresponding CU individuals. Additionally, the magnitude of mitophagy impairment correlated with the severity of clinical indicators in AD patients. Specifically, levels of PINK1 positively correlated with phosphorylated (p)-MAPT/tau (181), total (t)-MAPT/tau, NEFL (neurofilament light chain), and NRGN (neurogranin) levels in CSF and negatively with memory, executive function, and language domain. Serum TFEB levels negatively correlated with NEFL and positively with executive function and language. This study reveals mitophagy impairment reflected in biofluid biomarkers of individuals with AD and associated with more advanced AD pathology.Abbreviation: Aβ: amyloid beta; AD: Alzheimer disease; AVs: autophagic vacuoles; BNIP3L: BCL2 interacting protein 3 like; CU: cognitively unimpaired; CSF: cerebrospinal fluid; LAMP1: lysosomal-associated membrane protein 1; MAP1LC3/LC3: microtubule associated protein 1 light chain 3; MCI: mild cognitive impairment; NRGN: neurogranin; NEFL: neurofilament light chain; p-MAPT/tau: phosphorylated microtubule associated protein tau; PINK1: PTEN induced kinase 1; t-MAPT/tau: total microtubule associated protein tau; TFEB: transcription factor EB; TMT: Trail Making Test.

Social cognition in Idiopathic generalised epilepsies

Social cognition is a set of mental skills necessary to create satisfactory interpersonal relationships and feel a sense of belonging to a social group. Its deficits significantly reduce the quality of life in people with epilepsy. Studies on social cognition and its impairments focus predominantly on people with focal epilepsies. Idiopathic generalised epilepsies are a group of diseases that share similar clinical, prognostic and electrographic characteristics. Despite their typically normal intelligence, people with Idiopathic generalised epilepsies can suffer from learning disabilities and executive dysfunctions. Current studies also suggest social cognition impairments, but their results are inconsistent. This review offers the latest knowledge of social cognition in adults with Idiopathic generalised epilepsies. In addition, we provide an overview of the most frequently used assessment methods. We explain possible reasons for different outcomes and discuss future research perspectives.

Multidimensional assessment of social cognition using non-immersive virtual reality in dementia with Lewy bodies and Alzheimer's disease: an exploratory study

INTRODUCTION

Few studies have focused on social cognition in dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), even though some brain structures being well known as underlying social cognitive processes are directly impacted in this disease. Furthermore, social cognition processes have been mostly studied independently using evaluations with poor ecological validity. We aimed at studying the ability of a new naturalistic and multidimensional social cognition task to reveal impairments in DLB patients. We chose to compare the profile of these patients with that of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, for which social cognition is better preserved.

METHOD

Fifteen patients (DLB: n = 7; AD: n = 8) and 28 healthy controls underwent the REALSoCog task. They encountered several social situations (e.g. control versus transgressions) in a non-immersive virtual city environment allowing the assessment of moral cognition, cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM), emotional empathy and behavioral intentions.

RESULTS

The main results showed (i) a lower ability to detect transgressions in DLB patients, particularly conventional ones, whereas moral cognition seemed better preserved in AD patients; (ii) a cognitive ToM impairment in both DLB and AD patients, while affective ToM is impaired only in DLB patients; (iii) a decreased emotional empathy specifically observed in DLB patients; (iv) more inappropriate behavioral intentions, mainly in DLB patients, but also in some AD patients.

CONCLUSIONS

This study suggests the feasibility and potential interest of the REALSoCog task in revealing social cognition deficits, particularly for DLB patients by showing different social patterns as compared to AD patients. These results offer interesting clinical perspectives to develop more naturalistic tasks in such populations and for clinical differential diagnosis. Limitations and future perspectives are discussed.

Deep Learning of Speech Data for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease in the Elderly

BACKGROUND

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, which makes the lives of patients and their families difficult for various reasons. Therefore, early detection of AD is crucial to alleviating the symptoms through medication and treatment.

OBJECTIVE

Given that AD strongly induces language disorders, this study aims to detect AD rapidly by analyzing the language characteristics.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The mini-mental state examination for dementia screening (MMSE-DS), which is most commonly used in South Korean public health centers, is used to obtain negative answers based on the questionnaire. Among the acquired voices, significant questionnaires and answers are selected and converted into mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC)-based spectrogram images. After accumulating the significant answers, validated data augmentation was achieved using the Densenet121 model. Five deep learning models, Inception v3, VGG19, Xception, Resnet50, and Densenet121, were used to train and confirm the results.

RESULTS

Considering the amount of data, the results of the five-fold cross-validation are more significant than those of the hold-out method. Densenet121 exhibits a sensitivity of 0.9550, a specificity of 0.8333, and an accuracy of 0.9000 in a five-fold cross-validation to separate AD patients from the control group.

CONCLUSIONS

The potential for remote health care can be increased by simplifying the AD screening process. Furthermore, by facilitating remote health care, the proposed method can enhance the accessibility of AD screening and increase the rate of early AD detection.

Emotion recognition and processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment: A systematic review

The purpose of this study was to investigate emotion recognition and processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in order to update the state of current literature on this important but undervalued topic. We identified 15 papers published between 2012 and 2022 that meet the inclusion criteria. Paper search, selection, and extraction followed the PRISMA guidelines. We used a narrative synthesis approach in order to report a summary of the main findings taken from all papers. The results collected are still ambiguous: some studies did not find any differences between MCI and healthy controls (HC) groups in emotion recognition and processing, and other results reported emotion-specific deficits in emotion recognition regarding MCI patients (both regarding negative and neutral emotions). It is essential to underline that these findings could not be generalized to the whole MCI population due to the heterogeneous use of measures and composition of the sample. This does not allow us to make a comprehensive comparison between the results. Our suggestion for future research is to align the results using the same type of tests and emotion recognition assessment.

Emotion Recognition in a Health Continuum: Comparison of Healthy Adults of Advancing Age, Community Dwelling Adults Bearing Vascular Risk Factors and People Diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment

The identification of basic emotions plays an important role in social relationships and behaviors linked to survival. In neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), the ability to recognize emotions may already be impaired at early stages of the disease, such as the stage of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). However, as regards vascular pathologies related to cognitive impairment, very little is known about emotion recognition in people bearing vascular risk factors (VRF). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine emotion recognition ability in the health continuum "healthy advancing age-advancing age with VRF-MCI". The sample consisted of 106 adults divided in three diagnostic groups; 43 adults with MCI, 41 adults bearing one or more VRF, and 22 healthy controls of advancing age (HC). Since HC were more educated and younger than the other two groups, the age-group and level of educational were taken into account in the statistical analyses. A dynamic visual test was administered to examine recognition of basic emotions and emotionally neutral conditions. The results showed only a significant diagnostic group x educational level interaction as regards total emotion recognition ability, F (4, 28.910) = 4.117 p = 0.004 η2 = 0.166. High educational level seems to contribute to a high-level-emotion-recognition-performance both in healthy adults of advancing age and in adults bearing vascular risk factors. Medium educational level appears to play the same role only in healthy adults. Neither educational level can help MCI people to enhance their significantly lower emotion recognition ability.