Cognitive guidance and improvement of Alzheimer's disease patients based on human-computer interaction design

Cognitive dysfunction is a common problem in patients with Alzheimer's disease. This not only affects the comprehensive rehabilitation of motor function and activities of daily living, but also directly affects the social adaptability, and brings difficulties to the reintegration of Alzheimer's patients. Therefore, cognitive rehabilitation of Alzheimer's patients has become one of the important topics facing the medical community. Under the concept of human-computer interaction design, this study uses puzzle games as an entry point to observe the impact of puzzle games on cognitive function guidance and improvement in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Expecting to provide daily rehabilitation for patients with Alzheimer's disease. It is also hoped that it can promote the cognitive ability recovery of Alzheimer's patients, effectively delay the progress of dementia, improve the daily living ability and adaptability of patients, and improve the quality of life and life.     

Cognitive Transformation,Dementia, and the Moral Weight of Advance Directives

Abstract

Dementia patients in the moderate-late stage of the disease can, and often do, express different preferences than they did at the onset of their condition. The received view in the philosophical literature argues that advance directives which prioritize the patient’s preferences at onset ought to be given decisive moral weight in medical decision-making. Clinical practice, on the other hand, favors giving moral weight to the preferences expressed by dementia patients after onset. The purpose of this article is to show that the received view in the philosophical literature is inadequate and is out of touch with real clinical practice. I argue that having dementia is a cognitive transformative experience and that preference changes which result from this are legitimate and ought to be given moral weight in medical decision-making. This argument ought to encourage us to reduce our confidence in the moral weight of advance directives for dementia patients.     

Illness representations,pain and physical function in patients with rheumatic disorders: between- and within-person associations

Objectives: Rehabilitation for patients with rheumatic diseases improves both illness representations (IR) and clinical outcomes such as pain and physical functioning (PF). However, it is unclear whether IR may affect and, in turn, are affected by pain and PF. In this study, we examined both between-person associations and within-person associations between IR and pain/PF over time on three measurement occasions. Furthermore, cross-lagged relationships were examined.

Design and main outcome measures: This secondary analysis is based on data from N?=?186 patients with rheumatic diseases. Data on pain, PF and IR were assessed using self-report questionnaires at the beginning, the end and three months after a 3-week inpatient rehabilitation.

Methods: To separate between- and within-person level, data were analysed using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models.

Results: On both the between-person level (r?=?|0.21|???|0.44|) and the within-person level (r?=?|0.15|???|0.46|), pain and PF were related to cognitive and emotional IR. In addition, we found within-person bidirectional cross-lagged effects between emotional IR and PF.

Conclusion: IR show complex relationships with pain and PF. Improving PF might improve subsequent illness-related emotional distress and vice versa.     

Not in Man's Image:

No abstract available for this article.     

Cognitive and motor deficits in older adults with HIV infection: Comparison with normal ageing and Parkinson’s disease

Despite the life-extending success of antiretroviral pharmacotherapy in HIV infection (HIV), the prevalence of mild cognitive impairment in HIV remains high. Near-normal life expectancy invokes an emerging role for age–infection interaction and a potential synergy between immunosenescence and HIV-related health factors, increasing risk of cognitive and motor impairment associated with degradation in corticostriatal circuits. These neural systems are also compromised in Parkinson’s disease (PD), which could help model the cognitive deficit pattern in HIV. This cross-sectional study examined three groups, age 45–79 years: 42 HIV, 41 PD, and 37 control (CTRL) participants, tested at Stanford University Medical School and SRI International. Neuropsychological tests assessed executive function (EF), information processing speed (IPS), episodic memory (MEM), visuospatial processing (VSP), and upper motor (MOT) speed and dexterity. The HIV and PD deficit profiles were similar for EF, MEM, and VSP. Although only the PD group was impaired on MOT compared with CTRL, MOT scores were related to cognitive scores in HIV but not PD. Performance was not related to depressive symptoms, socioeconomic status, or CD4⁺ T-cell counts. The overlap of HIV-PD cognitive deficits implicates frontostriatal disruption in both conditions. The motor-cognitive score relation in HIV provides further support for the hypothesis that these processes share similar underlying mechanisms in HIV infection possibly expressed with or exacerbated by ageing.     

Analysis and Discrimination of Surface Electromyographic Features for Parkinson’s Disease during Elbow Flexion Movements

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder. Early intervention/treatment relies on early diagnosis of PD. There is increasing interest in methods based on electromyography measurements of PD patients because of its noninvasiveness. Thus, this study was to investigate electromyographic (EMG) characteristics of the upper limb between PD patients and healthy control subjects using EMG, and to distinguish PD patients from healthy control subjects according to the EMG information using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Sixteen right-handed PD patients and 25 right-handed healthy subjects participated in experiments involving elbow flexion movement. The frequency power, duration, skewness, recurrence rate, and correlation dimension of EMG signals and success rate for the right hand and the skewness of EMG signals for the left hand were found to be significantly different between the two groups. This information was subsequently used to distinguish PD patients from healthy control subjects using the SVM classifier to obtain a mean accuracy of 87.02%. Although the results may not be immediately available to use in clinical applications, the safety, simplicity and speed of the system still merits further consideration. Enhancing performance accuracy and examining PD patients in different stages of disease are anticipated in future investigations.     

关于疾病的预防和早期诊断的全方位思考

从扁鹊见蔡桓公的故事思考疾病预防与早期诊断治疗的意义，分析存在的主要问题，其中很大一部分源于对疾病预防和疾病的早期诊疗的重视程度不够，进而从患者、社会、医院三方面探求其解决方法。通过提高大众的防患意识，充分发挥医院在此的优势，进一步完善医保制度等方式来解决。     

Production of Inflected Novel Words in Older Adults With and Without Dementia

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish-conforming pseudo-words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants' inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single-route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual-route models).