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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Michael FirbankORCiD, Dr Xenia Kobeleva, Dr Alison Killen, Dr Peter GallagherORCiD, Professor David Burn, Professor Alan ThomasORCiD, Professor John O'Brien, Professor John-Paul TaylorORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Attentional and executive dysfunction contribute to cognitive impairment in both Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Using functional MRI, we examined the neural correlates of three components of attention (alerting, orienting and executive/conflict function) in 23 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, 32 patients with Lewy body dementia (19 with dementia with Lewy bodies and 13 with Parkinson’s disease with dementia) and 23 healthy controls using a modified Attention Network Test. Although the functional MRI demonstrated a similar fronto-parieto-occipital network activation in all groups, Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia patients had greater activation of this network for incongruent and more difficult trials, which were also accompanied by slower reaction times. There was no recruitment of additional brain regions or, conversely, regional deficits in brain activation. The default mode network, however, displayed diverging activity patterns in the dementia groups. The Alzheimer’s disease group had limited task related deactivations of the default mode network, whereas patients with Lewy body dementia showed heightened deactivation to all trials, which might be an attempt to allocate neural resources to impaired attentional networks. We posit that, despite a common endpoint of attention-executive disturbances in both dementias, the pathophysiological basis of these is very different between these diseases.
Author(s): Firbank M, Kobeleva X, Cherry G, Killen A, Gallagher P, Burn DJ, Thomas AJ, O'Brien JT, Taylor JP
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Human Brain Mapping
Year: 2016
Volume: 37
Issue: 3
Pages: 1254-1270
Print publication date: 01/03/2016
Online publication date: 26/12/2015
Acceptance date: 13/12/2015
Date deposited: 06/01/2016
ISSN (print): 1065-9471
ISSN (electronic): 1097-0193
Publisher: Wiley
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hbm.23100
DOI: 10.1002/hbm.23100
PubMed id: 26705763
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