Assessing Executive Dysfunction in Neurodegenerative Disorders: A Critical Review of Brief Neuropsychological Tools

Executive function (EF) has been defined as a multifaceted construct that involves a variety of high-level cognitive abilities such as planning, working memory, mental flexibility, and inhibition. Being able to identify deficits in EF is important for the diagnosis and monitoring of several neurodegenerative disorders, and thus their assessment is a topic of much debate. In particular, there has been a growing interest in the development of neuropsychological screening tools that can potentially provide a reliable quick measure of EF. In this review, we critically discuss the four screening tools of EF currently available in the literature: Executive Interview-25 (EXIT 25), Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB), INECO Frontal Screening (IFS), and FRONTIER Executive Screen (FES). We first describe their features, and then evaluate their psychometric properties, the existing evidence on their neural correlates, and the empirical work that has been conducted in clinical populations. We conclude that the four screening tools generally present appropriate psychometric properties, and are sensitive to impairments in EF in several neurodegenerative conditions. However, more research will be needed mostly with respect to normative data and neural correlates, and to determine the extent to which these tools add specific information to the one provided by global cognition screening tests. More research directly comparing the available tools with each other will also be important to establish in which conditions each of them can be most useful.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Serum Leptin Concentrations in Turkish Parkinson’s Disease Population

Objectives. To investigate leptin levels and their relationship to body composition and demographic and clinical characteristics of Turkish patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Patients and Methods. Forty eligible PD patients and 25 healthy controls were included in the study. Body composition measurements (height, weight, waist circumference (WC), and body mass index (BMI)) of the whole sample and clinical findings of PD patients were evaluated in the on-state. A single 5 mL fasting blood sample was obtained from each participant in the morning. Severity of PD was evaluated using the Hoehn and Yahr scale and the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale. Results. The mean age of the patients and controls was 60.8±9.4 and 61.8±5.8 years, while the mean BMI was 30.17±5.10 and 28.03±3.23 and the mean leptin levels were 6.8±6.9 and 3.9±3.8 ng/mL, respectively. Only age and gender were correlated with leptin levels. There was a significant difference (P<0.001) in leptin levels between male (3.6±3.1 ng/mL) and female (14.3±7.7 ng/mL) PD patients. Among the male PD patients, older age and higher BMI and WC values were associated with higher mean leptin levels. There was not any significant relationship between leptin levels and clinical findings in PD patients. Conclusion. These results may suggest that leptin levels have no determinative role in the follow-up of PD patients with regard to the severity and clinical prognosis of PD

A case of primary gait ignition failure

Gait ignition failure (GIF) is clinically and pathologically a poorly defined term that has gone with many different names before. Coexistence with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, multisystem atrophy, vascular parkinsonism, posthypoxic pallidal lesions and normal pressure hydrocephalus is common. Primary GIF is rare. Main problem is start hesitation and freezing. Here, we present a 69 year old woman whose chief complaint is difficulty of gait. She did not have any other extrapiramidal signs and her MRI did not reveal any abnormality. She was diagnosed as primary gait ignition failur