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[P3–470]: COGNITIVE RESERVE (CR) AND COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE IN PEOPLE WITH SUBJECTIVE COGNITIVE COMPLAINTS (SCCS)
Author(s) -
LojoSeoane Cristina,
Facal David,
Pereiro Arturo X.,
CamposMagdaleno Maria,
Mallo Sabela C.,
GonzálezAbraldes Isabel,
JuncosRabadán Onésimo
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
alzheimer's and dementia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.713
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1552-5279
pISSN - 1552-5260
DOI - 10.1016/j.jalz.2017.06.1688
Subject(s) - cognitive reserve , cognition , psychology , effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance , dementia , neuropsychology , boston naming test , verbal fluency test , cognitive decline , clinical psychology , audiology , gerontology , cognitive impairment , medicine , psychiatry , disease
Background:Assessment of dementia tends to emphasise irreversible loss of function. However, early diagnosis and effective treatment of dementia will likely requirenewtests that candynamically challenge thebrain’s residual functional capacity. Here we illustrate the feasibility of applying such tests to assess dynamic speech processing capacity in the language cortex of patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA).Methods:We assessed patients’ ability to understand speech signals under conditions of sinewave replacement (removing spectral detail from speech sounds). Patients representing all major PPA syndromes were compared with healthy age-matched controls. Participants’ performance was measured in terms of how quickly they learned to understand degraded sinewave speech in two tasks, the secondofwhich exploited semantic prediction to boost task performance. Results: Relative to healthy controls, patients with logopenic aphasia (LPA) and progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) showed deficient perceptual learning of sinewave speech, while patients with semantic dementia (SD) showed impaired performance when the task required integration of semantic knowledge. Conclusions:The findings suggest distinct syndromic profiles of dynamic speech decoding: LPA and PNFA are associated with core deficits of ‘bottom-up’ perceptual analysis, whereas SD is associated with a deficit of ‘top-down’ semantic integration. Procedures of this kind could form the basis for future speech-based ‘stress tests’ to assess early language dysfunction, residual cerebral plasticity and treatment response in PPA and potentially other dementias, including Alzheimer’s disease.