Corrigendum: Computational Methods for Resting-State EEG of Patients With Disorders of Consciousness.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2019.00807.].

Computational Methods for Resting-State EEG of Patients With Disorders of Consciousness.

Patients who survive brain injuries may develop Disorders of Consciousness (DOC) such as Coma, Vegetative State (VS) or Minimally Conscious State (MCS). Unfortunately, the rate of misdiagnosis between VS and MCS due to clinical judgment is high. Therefore, diagnostic decision support systems aiming to correct any differentiation between VS and MCS are essential for the characterization of an adequate treatment and an effective prognosis. In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the new EEG computational techniques. We have reviewed how resting-state EEG is computationally analyzed to support differential diagnosis between VS and MCS in view of applicability of these methods in clinical practice. The studies available so far have used different techniques and analyses; it is therefore hard to draw general conclusions. Studies using a discriminant analysis with a combination of various factors and reporting a cut-off are among the most interesting ones for a future clinical application.

Memory impairment in patients with late-onset major depression: the effect of antidepressant therapy.

BACKGROUND: Cognitive deficits have been described in patients with major depression (MD), although many aspects remain unsettled. METHOD: During an episode of MD and after remission we used tasks exploring attention, implicit, anterograde and retrograde memory to investigate 48 drug-free patients aged over 50 years without dementia, comparing them with 15 normal volunteer controls (NC). We also evaluated the effect of antidepressant therapy (ADT) with fluoxetine (F) or reboxetine (R) at baseline (T0) and six months later (T6). RESULTS: 42 patients completed the study and 6 dropped out; 33 patients were considered "Remitters" (RP) (17 F pts and 16 R pts). At T0, the entire group of MD patients (MDP) had worse performances than NC in Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE), Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS) total score (TS), in a few subtests of WMS and in autobiographical memory. RP at T0 had the same impaired tasks and at T6 had significantly improved in MMSE, WMS. TS and many memory tests but they still differed from NC in a few complex tasks requiring more cognitive effort. LIMITATIONS: The effects and differences between F and R must be viewed with caution considering the relatively small sample; only attention and memory were investigated. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings confirm a negative effect of depression on memory with a significant but incomplete improvement after remission and without differences between F and R. We speculate that both a "state" and a "trait" depressive component underlie this memory impairment.

Value of clinical data and neuropsychological measures in probable Alzheimer's disease.

We examined retrospectively 60 probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) outpatients, 30 with early onset (EOP) and 30 with late onset (LOP), divided into two groups on the basis of illness duration (within 2 years (P<2) and over 2 years (P>2)), compared with 60 normal controls (NC). We employed a battery of neuropsychological tests including the mini mental state examination (MMSE) and our brief mental deterioration battery (BMDB), computerized psychomotor performance tests and staging of functional impairment. EOP were worse than LOP in verbal fluency and in functional impairment, being better only in Rey's long-term verbal memory (RLT). P>2 were more compromised than P<2 in functional impairment, MMSE, personal and temporal orientation and RLT. Our BMDB showed the highest accuracy in classifying probably AD patients, whereas, MMSE had a high specificity but poor sensitivity as well as psychomotor performance tasks. In conclusion, AD patients with early onset, having a worse functional impairment, appear to be an eligible group to evaluate possible changes in response to antidementia treatment.

Sleep disorders in patients with spinal cord injury.

Sleep disturbances are globally more frequent in patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) than in the able-bodied population, and could contribute to dysfunction and poor quality of life in these patients. Specific sleep disorders may also contribute to negative health outcomes enhancing cardiovascular risk in a condition that per se increases heart disease related mortality. This review focuses on prevalence, features and treatment of sleep disorders in SCI. Although data on these subjects have been produced, reports on pathophysiology, consequences and treatment of sleep disorders are scarce or contradictory and more studies are required.