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Biomedical subjects

N S Foldi

Publications and source records attributed to N S Foldi.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Cognitive and behavioral dysfunction in Parkinson's disease: neurochemical and clinicopathological contributions.

The cognitive and behavioral sequelae (i.e., nonmotor profile) of Parkinson's disease (PD), with executive dysfunction and depression being most prominent, have typically been overshadowed due to an emphasis on motor symptomatology. The apparent categorization of PD as a disorder isolated to the dopaminergic system may be a generalization of the disease pathology. Dopamine therapy, used for the treatment of motor symptoms, has not consistently been shown to resolve nonmotor impairments. Research evidence indicates that nondopaminergic neurotransmitter systems (i.e., serotonergic, noradrenergic, & cholinergic) are disrupted in PD and may contribute to cognitive and behavioral dysfunction. Furthermore, Lewy bodies within cortical and subcortical structures can add to the nonmotor profile in PD. Pharmacological interventions for the treatment of cognitive and behavioral impairments associated with PD are few, especially for nondemented patients. The current review of the literature highlights evidence that associates nonmotor dysfunctions with neurochemical and clinicopathological correlates of PD.

Brain↗
PubMed1999

The test for severe impairment: validity with the Dementia Rating Scale and utility as a longitudinal measure.

The Test for Severe Impairment (TSI; Albert & Cohen, 1992) was compared to the Dementia Rating Scale (DRS; Mattis, 1988) on nursing home patients identified with cognitive impairment. Construct validity, criterion validity, and reliability on repeated, longitudinal testing were determined. The TSI was also compared with the shortened form of the Boston Naming Test (Mack, Freed, Williams, & Henderson, 1992). Results show that the TSI is a valid tool of different cognitive domains and is useful in longitudinal settings where repeat testing is required. Moreover, although the TSI was a test designed for late stage assessment, it is a comparable measure with the DRS and can be used across the different levels of cognitive impairment in dementia.

Aged↗
PubMed1995

Improving the diagnostic accuracy of the Mini-Mental State Examination.

INTRODUCTION: We determined the diagnostic accuracy of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) for dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) in an outpatient geriatric referral center in Switzerland. MATERIAL & METHODS: DAT patients and elderly controls were assigned to two groups: a validation sample (70 DAT patients; 50 controls) and a cross-validation sample (133 DAT patients; 43 controls). A Receiver Operating Characteristic curve was generated to derive the optimal MMSE cut-off score in the validation sample. RESULTS: The optimal MMSE cut-off was < 26/30 (sensitivity of 74%, specificity of 100%). Adjustments for age and education were necessary. The cross-validation confirmed these findings. CONCLUSION: iN A clinical setting the MMSE cut-off should be increased to < 26/30. A thorough neurobehavioral assessment is still necessary for a complete evaluation.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1992

Selective attention skills in Alzheimer's disease: performance on graded cancellation tests varying in density and complexity.

Nine selective cancellation tasks were administered to nine subjects with Alzheimer's disease (AD), nine elderly control, and eight depressed subjects. Each task consisted of an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper containing line drawings of geometric shapes that were identified as either targets or distractors. The nine forms of the task varied along two independent graded dimensions: (1) the total number of items in the field (Density: 3 levels) and (2) the number of different distractors in the surround (Complexity: 3 levels). Performance of the AD group was worse than that of the other groups, and performance for all groups declined with density. Error analysis of the impaired performance of the AD subjects showed that they made errors of omission that differed significantly as a function of density. There was no evidence that they could adopt a chunking strategy to accommodate the increased load.

Aged↗
PubMed1987

Appreciation of pragmatic interpretations of indirect commands: comparison of right and left hemisphere brain-damaged patients.

Indirect commands can elicit "literal" interpretations, directly reflecting the content and form of the utterance, or "pragmatic" interpretations, incorporating knowledge of paralinguistic, social, or historical cues. The aim of this study was to demonstrate how right brain-damaged (RBD) subjects would perform on judgments of these forms of communication. It was predicted that relative to normal controls or aphasic subjects, the RBD subjects would have significant difficulty appreciating the pragmatic interpretation relative to the literal one. Subjects judged the appropriateness of two-part exchanges consisting of indirect commands, direct commands, Wh-questions coupled with pragmatic responses, literal responses, responses verifying the physical surround, or syntactically similar responses. The results confirm that the RBD subjects had a selective difficulty appreciating the indirect commands. Their preference of literal over pragmatic interpretations was significantly different to that of aphasics or normal controls. Hypotheses are offered to explain these data.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1979

Lexical semantics and memory for words in aphasia.

Aphasic and non-neurological patients were assessed on a word recognition memory task. On any one trial, some words were instances of the same superordinate category, thus presupposing a common abstract conceptual feature, and some words could be linked thematically in the sense of forming context-dependent relations. Observing the temporal order in which patients pointed to the words they recognized permitted an assessment of the extent to which they clustered their responses either in terms of superordinate categories or along thematic lines. The conceptual structures indicated by these clusters were compared with those observed in a previous task requiring judgments of word relatedness. The data suggest that verbal memory limitations in aphasia are only in part linked to constraints on the conceptual features structuring lexical knowledge; and relatedly they raise the possibility that aphasics may have a disturbance of mnemonic processing quite apart from any disruption to language.

Adult↗