cognitive impairment, dementia, language decline, MCI, SCD
Conditions
Interventions
Not applicable.
Sponsors
Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen
Eligibility
Age
18 Years to 99 Years
Inclusion criteria
Inclusion criteria: Age >=50 years Right-handedness Diagnosis of aMCI based on neurologist evaluation or subjective cognitive complaints with no official diagnosis. aMCI will be defined as having a verbal memory score 1.5 standard deviations below the normative control values on both sub-scales. Signed written informed consent.
Exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria: 1. History of psychiatric or neurological illness other than MCI (exception is for depression in MCI group as it is co-morbid with MCI) 2. Excessive intake of alcohol (>2 units per day) 3. Drug abuse 4. Severe scalp skin lesions 5. Color blindness
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| N-back task is a popular measure of working memory involving an activation of the FPN (Mencarelli et al., 2019). A metanalysis showed age-related decline in n-back performance where accuracy decreases and response time increases as the load increases (Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2018). In this study, we will use three different load factors (i.e., 0, 1, and 2) in order to explore the difference in performance as well as related neuroimaging and eye-tracking measures between healthy, SCD, and MCI groups. Three language tasks will be employed: action and object naming, comprehension of passive and active reversible and irreversible sentences, as well as elicited imitation of complex sentences. Since an impairment in action naming due to reduced lexical access to verbs has been described (Macoir et al., 2019), the naming test will be administered consisting of 48 object and 48 action pictures. Sung et al. (2020) found a sentence comprehension deficit in the MCI stage when the syntactic complexity was increased (passive sentences). This is why we will test the comprehension of passive and active sentences, including 128 sentences, matched for frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness, word length, and valence. The last language task administered will be the Elicited imitation (Lust, Flynn and Foley 1996) of complex sentences used in the Sherman et al. (2013) study, including coordinated clauses and relative clauses, varied according to syntactic and semantic factors. The participants will be asked to repeat the sentences they hear. fNIRS + EEG The fNIRS cap will be placed on the participants* head. Concentration changes of oxygenated (oxyHb) and deoxygenated (Hb) haemoglobin will be recorded using NIRS. Sources and detectors will be distributed on the Broca*s and Wernicke*s area. Main parameters/outcomes: - Differences in HBO levels during all four tasks (F test; GLM; analysed using NIRS Toolbox), group comparisons - Change in fronto-parietal EEG s | — |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| 1. Correlation of verbal fluency and language performance. 2. Correlation between executive functions and language performance. 3. Correlation of pupil dilation measures and performance during cognitive and linguistic tasks. | — |
Countries
Netherlands
Contacts
Public ContactB. Curcic-Blake
Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen
Outcome results
None listed