Abstract
Our aim was to investigate the functional underpinnings of autobiographical memory (AM) impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. To that end, 18 patients and 18 controls underwent the autobiographical interview (AI). Subsequently, the 36 participants underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session designed to assess the construction and elaboration of AMs. A categorical control task was also presented. Patients were trained in the fMRI procedure to optimise the procedural aspects accompanying the task itself. Although the patients obtained significantly poorer AI scores (p < .001), their performance on the easier AM fMRI task was efficiently carried out, allowing relevant comparisons with healthy controls. Relatively to healthy controls, the patients showed increased and bilateral cerebral activations (p < .005) during the construction and elaboration phases. The prefrontal, temporal and posterior cerebral region activations were located within the core network sustaining AM, with the bilateral prefrontal region being centrally involved. The parametric neural responses to the difficulty of access and amount of details of memories were also significantly different for the two groups, with the right hippocampal region showing a particularly increased recruitment (p < .005). The findings suggested the presence of functional cerebral changes during AM performance and supported the presence of AM retrieval deficit in MS patients.
Highlights
Our aim was to investigate the functional underpinnings of autobiographical memory (AM) impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients
With regard to the autobiographical interview (AI) performance, the MS patients and the healthy control group provided respectively, on average, 14.71 internal details (SD = 3.56) vs 29.11 (SD = 7.56), with a mean total ratings of 4.12 (SD = 1.11) vs 7.71 (SD = 1.63) during the free recall phase. These descriptive results revealed that our group of MS patients provided a mean number of internal details approximately two SDs below those provided by healthy controls in the normative database provided by Ernst et al (2012)
Post-scan results highlighted a main effect of the event type (F = 123.30; p < .001), and Tukey HSD post-hoc test revealed a higher number of unique events in comparison with the four other event types (p < .001 in all the cases)
Summary
Our aim was to investigate the functional underpinnings of autobiographical memory (AM) impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. 18 patients and 18 controls underwent the autobiographical interview (AI). The 36 participants underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session designed to assess the construction and elaboration of AMs. A categorical control task was presented. The patients obtained significantly poorer AI scores (p < .001), their performance on the easier AM fMRI task was efficiently carried out, allowing relevant comparisons with healthy controls. To healthy controls, the patients showed increased and bilateral cerebral activations (p < .005) during the construction and elaboration phases. The findings suggested the presence of functional cerebral changes during AM performance and supported the presence of AM retrieval deficit in MS patients
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