0000000001330763
AUTHOR
Gaetana Chillemi
Cognitive processess and cognitive reserve in multiple sclerosis
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is characterized by motor, cognitive, and neuropsychiatric symptoms, which can occur independently. While MS is traditionally considered an inflammatory disease of the white matter, degeneration of gray matter is increasingly recognized as an important contributor to the progressive cognitive decline. A protective factor against the progression of cognitive dysfunction in MS could be the cognitive reserve, defined as resistance to brain dysfunction. Aim of the present study is to evaluate the role of cognitive reserve for different aspects of cognitive dysfunction of patients with MS. We found that patients with MS and lower cognitive reserve have poorer neuropsychol…
Is There a Future for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation as a Therapeutic Tool?
Several techniques and protocols of non-invasive transcranial brain stimulation (NIBS), including transcranial magnetic and electrical stimuli, have been developed in the past decades. These techniques can induce long lasting changes in cortical excitability by promoting synaptic plasticity and thus may represent a therapeutic option in neuropsychiatric disorders. On the other hand, despite these techniques have become popular, the fragility and variability of the after effects are the major challenges that non-invasive transcranial brain stimulation currentlyfaces. Several factors may account for such a variability such as biological variations, measurement reproducibility, and the neurona…
Perceiving numbers alters time perception.
The representation of time, space and numbers are strictly linked in the primate's cognitive system. Here we show that merely looking at number symbols biases a temporal judgment on their duration depending upon the number's magnitude. In a first experiment, a group of healthy subjects was submitted to a time estimation task, requiring to judge whether the duration of a test stimulus was longer or shorter than that of a previous reference fixed stimulus (digit 5; duration 300 ms). Test stimuli were the digits 1, 5 and 9 ranging between 250 and 350 ms. The main results showed that temporal perception was biased according to the magnitude expressed by the digit: low digits (i.e. 1) leading to…
COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF SENSORY STIMULI IN CERVICAL DYSTONIA
Objective: Investigation of spatial and temporal recognition in Cervical Dystonia (CD). Methods: Four neuropsychological tasks, based on perception in time and space domains of visual and acoustic stimuli, were given to twenty-two CD patients and twenty-two age-matched healthy controls (C). Repeated measure ANOVA was run on group (CD, C), either pooling type of task (spatial, temporal) and type of stimuli (visual, acoustic) factors coming from all tasks either investigating single tasks. Results: In pooled analysis we found that CD were less accurate than C (F¼6.080, p¼0.018). In particular CD were worse in spatial-acoustic task (F¼5.839, p¼0.020). Significant differences were detected, eva…