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Study of a New Working Memory Paradigm for Hypertensive Patients
Author(s) -
Paradela Regina,
Cabella Brenno,
Nucci Mariana Penteado,
Irigoyen Maria Claudia
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supplement.lb491
Subject(s) - working memory , functional magnetic resonance imaging , psychology , stimulus (psychology) , cognition , audiology , executive functions , medicine , neuroscience , cognitive psychology
Working memory (WM) has been extensively explored in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and several programs have been developed to train this ability in different clinical conditions. Among them, Cogmed stands out, since its effects have shown beneficial for many populations, but few studies have evaluated the effects of this training on brain function. In addition, none of these studies were with hypertensive patients who are known to have deficits in executive functions, including WM. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the neuronal activation of hypertensive patients during a WM task. A next step will be to re‐evaluate activation after training with Cogmed and compare it with pre‐training. The results described are related to the pilot study carried out to evaluate the feasibility and adequacy of the proposed protocol. The pilot study was composed by two stages: 1) stimulus programming in E‐prime software version 1.2; and 2) acquisition of structural and functional images on a 3.0 T magnetic resonance imaging device, followed by analysis of the activation of brain areas of interest. The paradigm was adapted from Brehmer et al., 2011 and consists of two active conditions with different levels of difficulty, Low (4 stimuli) and High (6 stimuli), and their respective controls. The sample consisted of 4 healthy young volunteers and 1 patient with hypertension, as an exploratory analysis for future study intervention. The activation map obtained corresponds to the group analysis of these volunteers and the term ‘activation’ refers to the positive BOLD contrast. In the group activation maps (n = 4 Z‐score> 2.3; p, <0.05), the most activated regions in Low were superior parietal lobe, precuneus, frontal lobe, medial frontal gyrus, pre‐central gyrus, cingulate gyrus, temporal lobe, fusiform gyrus and thalamus; in the High condition the most activated areas were superior parietal lobe, precuneus, insula, frontal lobe, medial frontal gyrus and thalamus; and in the comparison between the active conditions (High x Low), we observed higher activation in the High condition in the superior parietal lobe. These preliminary results showed that the paradigm is activating areas involved with WM processing and a statistically significant difference between the conditions tested. In this way, we considered the protocol adequate to evaluate the neuronal activation during a WM task in a larger group of volunteers (N = 40) with arterial hypertension. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .