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Objectives: To test a culturally tailored intervention to improve Alzheimer's disease (AD) literacy among African Americans.Design: A 3-arm randomized comparative effectiveness trial.Setting: Community sites in Los Angeles, CA.Participants: 193 African American community-dwelling adults, ages 45 to 95 years old.Intervention: All groups attended BrainWorks Live, a culturally tailored, 60-minute talk show and received standard printed educational materials on AD. From there: a) the BrainWorks Live group received no further contact until the post-test; b) one intervention group received a 1-month, culturally tailored, unidirectional, daily text-message program; and c) a second intervention group received daily text messages based on the printed educational materials that the general public would receive. AD literacy was measured at baseline and one month post intervention.Measurements: Alzheimer's disease literacy and demographic and health covariates.Results: At one month, participants who received culturally tailored text messages had the highest increase in AD literacy levels, followed by those in the BrainWorks Live arm. Participants who received general text messages had a lower overall increase in AD literacy levels compared to the other arms, but had higher mean AD literacy levels than the BrainWorks Live arm. There was a significantly greater increase in AD literacy levels among participants who received culturally tailored text messages compared with those who attended BrainWorks Live only. There were no other statistically significant differences between arms.Conclusions: AD literacy among African Americans can be improved after only one month through culturally competent, economically feasible educational formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Because most successful interventions for Alzheimer''s disease (AD) rely upon early diagnosis and implementation, it is important to understand the factors influencing dementia treatment-seeking behaviors. These include perceptions, beliefs, values, and feelings relating to AD, which may vary among and within ethnic groups according to the strength of culturally-based explanatory models and individual group members'' ages and experiences. This study used ten focus groups drawn from Asian American communities representing different national origins (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) to examine the factors shaping attitudes toward AD in general, and treatment-seeking in particular, that may constitute barriers to timely diagnosis and treatment of AD among Asian Americans of various ages and cultural backgrounds. The results suggest that, while these communities share a keen awareness of AD, beliefs regarding the disorder may be influenced at least as strongly by folk wisdom and culturally acceptable partial truths as by scientific information. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Objective: To determine whether basal ganglia atrophy, known to be associated with apathy in nondementia populations, was associated with presence of apathy in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Methods: A cross-sectional case study was conducted at two tertiary dementia care clinics in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Striatal and thalamic gray matter volumes and apathy measures were collected from 21 subjects with FTD, 6 of whom did not show apathy on the Neuropsychiatric Inventory. Results: No significant differences in gray matter volumes were found between apathetic and nonapathetic groups for the striatum or the thalamus. Conclusions: Our findings imply that the etiology of apathy seen in patients with FTD differs from that of patients with apathy after acquired injuries to the basal ganglia. Further study is needed to determine whether posterior thalamic atrophy correlates with apathy in FTD or functional imaging techniques might successfully find a relationship between basal ganglia dysfunction and apathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study that used Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) data from the Alzheimer'sDisease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) to research the underlyingneuroanatomical correlates of delusions among Alzheimer's patients.

Abstract: Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) often presents with asymmetric atrophy. We assessed whether premorbid occupations in FTLD patients were associated with these hemispheric asymmetries. In a multi-center chart review of 588 patients, occupation information was related to location of tissue loss or dysfunction. Patients with atrophy lateralized to the right had professions more dependent on verbal abilities than patients with left-lateralized or symmetrical atrophy. In a subgroup of 96 well-characterized patients with quantified neuroimaging data, the lateralization effect was localized to the temporal lobes and included verbal and mathematical ability. Patients whose professions placed high demands on language and mathematics had relatively preserved left temporal relative to right temporal volumes. Thus, occupation selection occurring in early adulthood is related to lateralized brain asymmetry in patients who develop FTLD decades later in the relatively deficient hemisphere. The finding suggests that verbal and mathematical occupations may have been pursued due to developmental right-lateralized functional impairment that precedes the neurodegenerative process. Alternatively, long-term engagement of activities associated with these occupations contributed to left-lateralized reserve, right-lateralized dysfunction, or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Despite extensive investigations of the role of recollection and familiarity on laboratory-acquired memories, there is a dearth of such research on memories formed in real life settings. We used the Remember/Know paradigm to investigate the relative contribution of recollection and familiarity processes to memory of public historical events reported in the media across the life span of two groups of neurologically intact older adults (old-old: 74–85, young-old: 58–69) and on two patients with brain damage. First, in neurologically intact participants, recollection rates decreased as a function of time elapsed since the event occurred, at a significantly higher rate than the corresponding decrease in familiarity or global memory. Second, consistent with the hypothesis that memories become increasingly semantic as they age, and that recollection is selectively impaired in older adults, across decades, old-old participants exhibited lower recollection, but not familiarity, relative to young-old participants. Finally, as a demonstration of how this procedure may be applied to studies of clinical populations, we tested two patients, one with medial temporal lesions and another with relative sparing of the medial temporal lobes, but with anterior temporal damage. We found that recollection was disproportionately impaired relative to familiarity across most of the life span in the patient with medial temporal lesions severely while recollection was relatively intact in the patient with anterior lateral temporal damage. We discuss the present results in the context of neuroanatomical and process-oriented theories of how memories age. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We compared the reasoning performance of patients with frontal-variant frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) with that of patients with temporal-variant FTLD and healthy controls. In a picture analogy task with a multiple-choice answer format, frontal-variant FTLD patients performed less accurately than temporal-variant FTLD patients, who in turn performed worse than healthy controls, when semantic and perceptual distractors were present among the answer choices. When the distractor answer choices were eliminated, frontal-variant patients showed relatively greater improvement in performance. Similar patient groups were tested with a relational-pattern reasoning task that included manipulations of one or two relations and both perceptual and semantic extraneous information. Frontal-variant patients showed performance deficits on all tasks relative to the other subject groups, especially when distracted. These results demonstrate that intact prefrontal cortex (PFC) is necessary for controlling interference from perceptual and semantic distractors in order to reason from relational structure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]