Better cardiovascular health is associated with slowed clinical progression in autosomal dominant frontotemporal lobar degeneration variant carriers.

INTRODUCTION: Cardiovascular health is important for brain aging, yet its role in the clinical manifestation of autosomal dominant or atypical forms of dementia has not been fully elucidated. We examined relationships between Life's Simple 7 (LS7) and clinical trajectories in individuals with autosomal dominant frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). METHODS: Two hundred forty-seven adults carrying FTLD pathogenic genetic variants (53% asymptomatic) and 189 non-carrier controls completed baseline LS7, and longitudinal neuroimaging and neuropsychological testing. RESULTS: Among variant carriers, higher baseline LS7 is associated with slower accumulation of frontal white matter hyperintensities (WMHs), as well as slower memory and language declines. Higher baseline LS7 associated with larger baseline frontotemporal volume, but not frontotemporal volume trajectories. DISCUSSION: Better baseline cardiovascular health related to slower cognitive decline and accumulation of frontal WMHs in autosomal dominant FTLD. Optimizing cardiovascular health may be an important modifiable approach to bolster cognitive health and brain integrity in FTLD. HIGHLIGHTS: Better cardiovascular health associates with slower cognitive decline in frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). Lifestyle relates to the accumulation of frontal white matter hyperintensities in FTLD. More optimal cardiovascular health associates with greater baseline frontotemporal lobe volume. Optimized cardiovascular health relates to more favorable outcomes in genetic dementia.

Lesion-Related Delusional Misidentification Syndromes: A Comprehensive Review of Reported Cases.

Delusional misidentification syndromes (DMSs) are persistent delusions of hyper- or hypofamiliarity for meaningful persons and places in one's environment. This study set to determine the clinical course, neuroanatomical localization, neuropsychological abnormalities, and delusional content in patients with DMSs occurring after focal neurological injuries. Sixty-one patients were identified: 28 with hypofamiliar delusions, 27 with hyperfamiliar delusions, and, most surprisingly, six patients with both hypo- and hyperfamiliar delusions. Recognition is often delayed by months from the time of injury, and the delusions are self-limited. Patients with DMSs had right hemisphere (92%) injuries (specifically right frontal injuries in 63%), prominent memory impairment (73%), and multiple concurrent DMSs (29%).

Major memory for microblogs.

Online social networking is vastly popular and permits its members to post their thoughts as microblogs, an opportunity that people exploit, on Facebook alone, over 30 million times an hour. Such trivial ephemera, one might think, should vanish quickly from memory; conversely, they may comprise the sort of information that our memories are tuned to recognize, if that which we readily generate, we also readily store. In the first two experiments, participants' memory for Facebook posts was found to be strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books-a magnitude comparable to the difference in memory strength between amnesics and healthy controls. The second experiment suggested that this difference is not due to Facebook posts spontaneously generating social elaboration, because memory for posts is enhanced as much by adding social elaboration as is memory for book sentences. Our final experiment, using headlines, sentences, and reader comments from articles, suggested that the remarkable memory for microblogs is also not due to their completeness or simply their topic, but may be a more general phenomenon of their being the largely spontaneous and natural emanations of the human mind.

The immediate and delayed cardiovascular benefits of forgiving.

BACKGROUND: The putative health benefits of forgiveness may include long-term buffering against cardiovascular reactivity associated with rumination. Although studies show short-term benefits of adopting a forgiving perspective, it is uncertain whether this perspective protects against repeated future rumination on offenses, which may be necessary for long-term health benefits. Also unclear is whether forgiveness offers unique benefits beyond simple distraction. METHODS: Cardiovascular parameters (systolic blood pressure [SBP], diastolic blood pressure [DBP], and heart rate) were measured while 202 participants thought about a previous offense from an angry or forgiving perspective or were distracted. All participants were then distracted for 5 minutes, after which they freely ruminated on the offense. RESULTS: Angry rumination initially yielded the greatest increase in blood pressure from baseline (mean [M] [standard deviation {SD}]: SBP = 9.24 [11.16]; M [SD]: DBP = 4.69 [7.48]) compared with forgiveness (M [SD]: SBP = 3.30 [6.48]; M [SD]: DBP = 1.51 [4.94]) and distraction (M [SD]: SBP = 4.81 [6.28]; M [SD]: DBP = 1.75 [3.80]), which did not differ from each other (p > .30). During free rumination, however, those who had previously focused on forgiveness showed less reactivity (M [SD]: SBP = 7.33 [9.61]; M [SD]: DBP = 4.73 [7.33]) than those who had been distracted (M [SD]: SBP = 10.50 [7.77]; M [SD]: DBP = 7.71 [6.83]) and those who previously focused on angry rumination (M [SD]: SBP = 12.04 [11.74]; M [SD]: DBP = 8.64 [12.63]). There were no differences for heart rate. CONCLUSIONS: Forgiveness seems to lower reactivity both during the initial cognitive process and, more importantly, during mental recreations of an offense soon thereafter, potentially offering sustained protection, whereas effects of distraction appear transient.

Neuroimaging in Parkinson's disease dementia: connecting the dots.

Dementia is a common and devastating symptom of Parkinson's disease but the anatomical substrate remains unclear. Some evidence points towards hippocampal involvement but neuroimaging abnormalities have been reported throughout the brain and are largely inconsistent across studies. Here, we test whether these disparate neuroimaging findings for Parkinson's disease dementia localize to a common brain network. We used a literature search to identify studies reporting neuroimaging correlates of Parkinson's dementia (11 studies, 385 patients). We restricted our search to studies of brain atrophy and hypometabolism that compared Parkinson's patients with dementia to those without cognitive involvement. We used a standard coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis to assess for consistency in the neuroimaging findings. We then used a new approach, coordinate-based network mapping, to test whether neuroimaging findings localized to a common brain network. This approach uses resting-state functional connectivity from a large cohort of normative subjects (n = 1000) to identify the network of regions connected to a reported neuroimaging coordinate. Activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis failed to identify any brain regions consistently associated with Parkinson's dementia, showing major heterogeneity across studies. In contrast, coordinate-based network mapping found that these heterogeneous neuroimaging findings localized to a specific brain network centred on the hippocampus. Next, we tested whether this network showed symptom specificity and stage specificity by performing two further analyses. We tested symptom specificity by examining studies of Parkinson's hallucinations (9 studies, 402 patients) that are frequently co-morbid with Parkinson's dementia. We tested for stage specificity by using studies of mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (15 studies, 844 patients). Coordinate-based network mapping revealed that correlates of visual hallucinations fell within a network centred on bilateral lateral geniculate nucleus and correlates of mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease fell within a network centred on posterior default mode network. In both cases, the identified networks were distinct from the hippocampal network of Parkinson's dementia. Our results link heterogeneous neuroimaging findings in Parkinson's dementia to a common network centred on the hippocampus. This finding was symptom and stage-specific, with implications for understanding Parkinson's dementia and heterogeneity of neuroimaging findings in general.

The moderating role of ambivalent sexism: the influence of power status on perception of rape victim and rapist.

The authors examined the effect of ambivalent sexism on others' perceptions of alleged-rape incidents, in which there are socioeconomic status differences between the victims and their perpetrators. The dependent variables included measures of minimizing rape, blaming the victim, excusing the perpetrator, and determining the length of the recommended sentence. The results indicated 4 noteworthy findings: First, individuals who scored high on the hostile power relation (HPR) measure tended to minimize the seriousness of rape incidents. Second, the HPR measure moderated victim blame only in the powerful-man scenario. Third, participants who scored high on the HPR measure tended to believe that the alleged rapist held less responsibility. Fourth, female participants tended to give longer sentences.

Antibiotic-induced neurotoxicity.

Antibiotic neurotoxicity is rare but can cause significant morbidity when it occurs. The risk of antibiotic neurotoxicity appears to be highest in patients who are older, have impaired renal function, or have preexisting neurologic conditions. This review describes the clinical features of the most common antibiotic toxicities affecting the nervous system: seizures, encephalopathy, optic neuropathy, peripheral neuropathy, and exacerbation of myasthenia gravis.

Orexigenic peptides and alcohol intake: differential effects of orexin, galanin, and ghrelin.

BACKGROUND: The question is which hypothalamic systems for food intake might play a role in ethanol intake and contribute to alcohol abuse. The peptide orexin was found to exhibit similar properties to galanin in its relation to dietary fat and may therefore be similar to galanin in having a stimulatory effect on alcohol intake. METHODS: Rats were trained to drink 10% ethanol, implanted with brain cannulas, and then injected in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN), lateral hypothalamus (LH), or nucleus accumbens (NAc) with galanin, orexin-A, and for comparison, ghrelin. Ethanol, food, and water intake were measured at 1, 2, and 4 hours postinjection. RESULTS: In the PVN, both orexin and galanin significantly increased ethanol intake, whereas ghrelin increased food intake. In the LH, orexin again induced ethanol intake, while ghrelin increased eating. In the NAc, orexin failed to influence ethanol intake but did stimulate food intake. CONCLUSIONS: In ethanol-drinking rats, injection of orexin or galanin into the appropriate locus in the hypothalamus induced significant ethanol intake instead of food intake. Ghrelin, as a positive control, failed to influence ethanol intake at the same hypothalamic sites. In the NAc, as an anatomical control, orexin augmented eating but not ethanol intake. Thus orexin and galanin in the hypothalamus selectively stimulated ethanol intake at sites where other studies have shown that both ethanol and fat increase expression of the endogenous peptides. Thus, a neural circuit that evolved with the capability to augment food intake is apparently co-opted by ethanol and may serve as a potential positive feedback circuit for alcohol abuse.