Neuropsychology Of Aging Research Articles

No lockdown: The experience of a researcher in the neuropsychology of aging in Sweden during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

No lockdown: The experience of a researcher in the neuropsychology of aging in Sweden during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

Development and content validity of the CENEES program - psychoeducation for health staff on neuropsychology of aging

Worldwide life expectancy has increased dramatically in recent years. Also on the rise are incidents of pathologies related to aging, such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). An inaccurate diagnosis impairs the well-being and the quality of life of patients and their relatives, as well as being a financial burden on the health system. Continued education pertaining to the neuropsychological field is uncommon for health workers involved in general practice. This article aims to present the process of development and content validity of the “CENEES Program - Psychoeducation for Health Staff on The Neuropsychology of Aging”. The CENEES Program was developed in six steps which include: literature review, first draft, focal group, adjustments after focal group, judgment analysis (n = 4), and finally the last version. The inter-rater reliability index after judgment analysis was 0.785. The final version of the CENEES Program contains eight meetings, divided into 4 modules: 1) Fundamentals of Neuroscience; 2) Memory; 3) Executive Functions; and 4) Communication. The final meeting was called “Review”. The CENEES Program is a new resource to help professionals who work within the general practice field, especially community health workers. As far as we know, there is no psychoeducation program on aging which contains the four subjects that are covered in the CENEES Program. The CENEES Program could assist the workers’ daily activities and make them comfortable to offer and build actions in the community. A pilot and follow-up studies are suggested.

Introduction: Special issue on neuropsychology of aging.

Introduction: Special issue on neuropsychology of aging.

Chapter 10 - Neuropsychology of aging

All people want to age "successfully," maintaining functional capacity and quality of life as they reach advanced age. Achieving this goal depends on preserving optimal cognitive and brain functioning. Yet, significant individual differences exist in this regard. Some older adults continue to retain most cognitive abilities throughout their lifetime. Others experience declines in cognitive and functional capacity that range from mild decrements in certain cognitive functions over time to severe dementia among those with neurodegenerative diseases. Even among relatively healthy "successful agers," certain cognitive functions are reduced from earlier levels. This is particularly true for cognitive functions that are dependent on cognitive processing speed and efficiency. Working memory and executive and attentional functions tend to be most vulnerable. Learning and memory functions are also usually reduced, although in the absence of neurodegenerative disease learning and retrieval efficiency rather than memory storage are affected. Other functions, such as visual perception, language, semantics, and knowledge, are often well preserved. Structural, functional, and physiologic/metabolic brain changes correspond with age-associated cognitive decline. Physiologic and metabolic mechanisms, such as oxidative stress and neuroinflammation, may contribute to these changes, along with the contribution of comorbidities that secondarily affect the brain of older adults. Cognitive frailty often corresponds with physical frailty, both affected by multiple exogenous and endogenous factors. Neuropsychologic assessment provides a way of measuring the cognitive and functional status of older adults, which is useful for monitoring changes that may be occurring. Neuroimaging is also useful for characterizing age-associated structural, functional, physiologic, and metabolic brain changes, including alterations in cerebral blood flow and metabolite concentrations. Some interventions that may enhance cognitive function, such as cognitive training, neuromodulation, and pharmacologic approaches, exist or are being developed. Yet, preventing, slowing, and reversing the adverse effects of cognitive aging remains a challenge.

Does virtual reality have a future for the study of episodic memory in aging?

Episodic memory is the memory of personally lived events located in time and space, it shapes our identity and allows us to project ourselves into the past and the future. This form of memory is vulnerable to the effects of age and its alteration, hindering the autonomy of the subjects, can predict the evolution towards neurodegenerative disorders. Hence, a better understanding of this type of memory is a priority in the field of public health. Actually, traditional neuropsychological tools are often decontextualized, using simplistic situations that did not require the mobilization of all the characteristics of episodic memory, thus they just offer a partial measure of this complex mnemonic capacity. Nowadays, the virtual reality (VR) is a tool allowing the immersion of subjects in simulations of real situations, rich in spatial and temporal naturalistic contexts. Due to its many characteristics, the VR allows to solve several limitations of the traditional tests. The purpose of this review is to expose studies that investigated episodic memory in normal and Alzheimer's disease using VR in order to address its relevance as a new tool in the future practice of neuropsychology of aging.

Neuropsychology of aging, past, present and future: Contributions of Morris Moscovitch

In this review we provide a broad overview of major trends in the cognitive neuroscience of aging and illustrate their roots in the pioneering ideas and discoveries of Morris Moscovitch and his close collaborators, especially Gordon Winocur. These trends include an on-going focus on the specific and dissociable contributions of medial temporal and frontal lobe processes to cognitive aging, especially in the memory domain, the role of individual variability stemming from different patterns of underlying neural decline, the possibility of compensatory neural and cognitive influences that alter the expression of neurobiological aging, and the investigation of lifestyle and psychosocial factors that affect plasticity and may contribute to the rate and level of neurocognitive decline. These prescient ideas, evident in the early work of Moscovitch and Winocur, continue to drive on-going research efforts in the cognitive neuroscience of aging.

Age-Related Differences in Discounting Future Gains and Losses.

When asked to choose between immediate versus future gains, individuals tend to fast-track benefits and, congruently, they tend to delay costs. But, despite the ever-increasing importance of the topic, few studies have investigated this behavior among senior citizens. The handful of studies that have been conducted have led to conflicting results and focused on gains as opposed to losses. These conflicting results may in part be due to demographic confounds and the inherent variability that comes with aging. Here, demographic confounds and variability due to aging were minimized by studying three groups: middle-aged, unimpaired-older, and impaired-older adults. Participants were asked to choose between sooner-smaller and later-larger monetary rewards and losses. Results indicated that impaired-older adults discounted the future more than unimpaired-older adults. Interestingly, middle-aged adults discounted future gains at a similar rate to impaired-older adults, but discounted future losses less than impaired-older adults (and similarly to unimpaired-older adults). This may suggest that unimpaired-older adults have developed a compensatory mechanism that leads to more cautious, patient choices. We discuss these results in the context of the neurobiology and neuropsychology of aging and decision making.

Sociocultural factors in Brazilian neuropsycholinguistic studies.

The history of Brazilian neuropsychology is traced at different neuropsycholinguistic stages with a focus on the importance of sociocultural factors. We first focus on language disorders, the sequelae of injuries in the left hemisphere, and neuropsychology restricted to the medical field in Europe, the United States, and Brazil. In the middle of the last century, attention to the interdisciplinary importance of studies on the right hemisphere began. Studies consequently emerged on the individual variability of brain function with both biological and cultural origins. Based on this approach, Brazilian studies on aphasic children and illiterate aphasic persons were disseminated internationally. In the 1970s, cognitive neuropsychology began in England, highlighting dysfunctions in reading and writing processes. The characteristics of writing systems within each language became relevant for the manifestations of acquired dyslexia. Brazilian studies showed deficits in Portuguese and Japanese writing caused by brain lesions. During this scientific journey, scientific societies and postgraduate programs in Brazil were created to facilitate exchanges and communication among young researchers. By the end of the last century and in the early 2000s, the growth of the neuropsychology of aging raised awareness of the complexity of sociocultural factors, not only on language research but also according to the level of education, frequency of reading and writing habits, school type, and interactions among these factors and biological factors, especially between the level of education and age. From this historical standpoint, we outline future directions and perspectives in the field of Brazilian neuropsychology.

Psychology and neuropsychology of aging

Psychology and neuropsychology of aging

Geroneuropsychology: The Neuropsychological Approach to the Study of Aging

The most compelling reason for studying the neuropsychology of aging is the fact that there are so many more people who are elderly. Worldwide average life expectancy has already increased more in the past 100 years than in the previous 2000 years, due mainly to public health advances which are consequently fueling a rapid population growth of the elderly. Gerontology (the study of aging) and Geriatrics (health care for the elderly) are expanding disciplines and will continue offering career and service opportunities to the increasing number people who are interested in answering the questions and addressing the problems of aging.

The neuropsychology of aging

The neuropsychology of aging

The neuropsychology of aging.

There are three general categories of causes of the cognitive decline associated with aging: disuse, disease, and aging per se. People tend to use certain skills or abilities less with age and, thus, those skills decline due to the disuse. Physical illnesses tend to increase with age, which will tend to compromise cognitive functioning. Further, there are actual neurobiological changes with age that will contribute to deterioration of cognitive abilities. Variability of performance between different individuals within an age group increases with age due to each of these three major contributing factors to age decline. The best defense against age-related cognitive deterioration is practice. Practice tends to mitigate the effects of aging by not allowing disuse to occur. In addition, practice can overcompensate for age effects by building a larger reserve capacity to offset any real neurobiological effects of age. Practice can also lead to compensatory strategies in which alternative way of maintaining performance levels are found.

Visuo-spatial attention and psychomotor performance in elderly community residents: effects of age, gender, and education.

In cross-sectional analysis of 1,799 subjects of the Paquid Research Program, an epidemiological study on brain aging conducted in the Bordeaux area (France), we have studied the effects of age, gender, and education level on psychometric tests requiring visuo-spatial focused attention and psychomotor performance. Although previous studies suggest that normal aging produces no significant change in focused attention, we did observe lower attentional abilities and lower speed of execution with increasing age. Female gender and low education level were also related to poorer attention and psychomotor performance. As the effects of these individual factors are difficult to disentangle from each other on the small samples of subjects used in group studies, epidemiological surveys seem useful to provide a better understanding of the neuropsychology of aging.

The neuropsychology of aging

This article reviews recent advances in the neuropsychological literature on aging, emphasizing trends that reflect promising directions for continued research. These include characterization of patterns of age-related cognitive change, identification of underlying cognitive/neurobiological mechanisms contributing to performance decline, clarification of individual differences affecting age-related cognitive change, and development of adequate norms for clinical neuropsychological tests

Neuropsychological Assessment in the Oldest-Old

Neuropsychology has an important role in a comprehensive psychogeriatric evaluation, especially in the assessment of dementia where the diagnosis is based on behavior. Current issues in the neuropsychology of aging and dementia in the oldest-old are discussed: the principal problem in the prevailing normative approach to discriminating between normal cognitive aging and pathology; the greater interindividual variability and, as a consequence, a need for subclassifications of individuals according to well-defined criteria; tests designed for cognitively impaired elderly and a contextual neuropsychological assessment procedure. Data from two ongoing Swedish studies of the oldest-old, illustrating some of these issues, are presented.

The neuropsychology of aging

Luria's clinical neuropsychological approach and analysis of frontal lobe syndromes are applied to the study of aging. Brain damage produces both functional deficits and positive signs. The functional deficits seen in association with the aging process resemble those of patients with frontal system pathology. In the present study, performance of normal aging subjects is examined qualitatively for the positive signs associated with damage to frontal structures, namely perseveration and segmentation. Significant positive correlation is found between increasing prevalence of these frontal features and increasing age. Significant sex differences are also found, with males exhibiting more of these frontal features than females.