Oxford brain health clinic: protocol and research database.

INTRODUCTION: Despite major advances in the field of neuroscience over the last three decades, the quality of assessments available to patients with memory problems in later life has barely changed. At the same time, a large proportion of dementia biomarker research is conducted in selected research samples that often poorly reflect the demographics of the population of patients who present to memory clinics. The Oxford Brain Health Clinic (BHC) is a newly developed clinical assessment service with embedded research in which all patients are offered high-quality clinical and research assessments, including MRI, as standard. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Here we describe the BHC protocol, including aligning our MRI scans with those collected in the UK Biobank. We evaluate rates of research consent for the first 108 patients (data collection ongoing) and the ability of typical psychiatry-led NHS memory-clinic patients to tolerate both clinical and research assessments. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Our ethics and consenting process enables patients to choose the level of research participation that suits them. This generates high rates of consent, enabling us to populate a research database with high-quality data that will be disseminated through a national platform (the Dementias Platform UK data portal).

Increased rostral anterior cingulate activity following positive mental imagery training in healthy older adults.

The ability to form positive mental images may be an important aspect of mental health and well-being. We have previously demonstrated that the vividness of positive prospective imagery is increased in healthy older adults following positive imagery cognitive training. The rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) is involved in the simulation of future affective episodes. Here, we investigate the effect of positive imagery training on rACC activity during the imagination of novel, ambiguous scenarios vs closely matched control training. Seventy-five participants received 4 weeks of positive imagery or control training. Participants underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, during which they completed an Ambiguous Sentences Task, which required them to form mental images in response to cues describing ambiguous social events. rACC activity was positively correlated with the pleasantness ratings of images formed. Positive imagery training increased rACC and bilateral hippocampal activity compared with the control training. Here, we demonstrate that rACC activity during positive imagery can be changed by the cognitive training. This is consistent with other evidence that this training enhances the vividness of positive imagery, and suggests the training may be acting to increase the intensity and affective quality of imagery simulating the future.