Intervención Neuropsicológica en un caso de una niña con Síndrome de Williams

El Síndrome de Williams (SW) es un trastorno genético del neurodesarrollo poco común, que se caracteriza por un perfil neuropsicológico definido por la presencia de mejores habilidades verbales que visoespaciales. El objetivo de este trabajo fue aplicar una intervención neuropsicológica para mejorar los procesos atencionales, visoespaciales y de memoria en una paciente con SW. La intervención se llevó a cabo durante 10 meses con sesiones semanales de una hora. El diseño del estudio fue evaluación-intervención-evaluación. Los resultados de la segunda evaluación fueron comparados con una muestra clínica. Con el fin de identificar cambios clínicos significativos antes y después de la intervención se utilizó el índice de cambio confiable. Se encontró que los procesos de atención sostenida, control inhibitorio, abstracción, memoria de trabajo, habilidades visoespaciales y memoria presentaron una mejoría clínica significativa a partir de la intervención realizada. Estos resultados dan evidencia de la importancia de la intervención neuropsicológica en pacientes con SW para mejorar el funcionamiento cognitivo y su calidad de vida

Social Cognition in Patients with Early-Onset Parkinson’s Disease

Social cognition (SC) deficits have been linked to Parkinson’s disease (PD) but have been less well researched than general cognitive processes, especially in early-onset PD (EOPD), despite this population often having greater social and family demands. Most studies focus on recognition of facial emotion, theory of mind (ToM), and decision-making domains, with limited research reporting on social reasoning. The main objective of this work was to compare SC ability across four domains: emotional processing, social reasoning, ToM, and decision-making between patients with EOPD and healthy controls. Twenty-five nondemented patients with EOPD and 25 controls matched for sex, age, and educational level were enrolled. A battery that included six SC tests was administered to all study participants; a decision-making scale was completed by participants’ partners. Statistically significant differences were found between patients with EOPD and controls in all subtests across the four SC domains studied. The EOPD group demonstrated worse performance on all tasks, with large effect sizes. Differences remained significant after adjusting for Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test scores for all SC subtests except the decision-making scale and the Iowa gambling task. No significant correlations between SC and other clinical PD variables were found. Our study shows that patients with EOPD perform significantly below controls in multiple SC domains affecting recognition of facial emotion, social reasoning, ToM, and decision-making. Only decision-making seems to be mediated by overall cognitive ability. The confounding or contributing effect of other clinical PD variables should be studied further