Medial temporal lobe function during emotional memory in early Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment and healthy ageing: an fMRI study

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Dichelle Wong¹  Jeremy Hall¹  Stephen M Lawrie¹  Jane Lonie¹  Heather C Whalley¹  Vivek Pattan²  Anna Beaglehole³  Mario A Parra⁴  Hong I Wan⁵  Garry Honey⁵ 

[1] Division of Psychiatry, School of Molecular Medicine, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Morningside, University of Edinburgh, EH10 5HF, Edinburgh, UK;Higher Specialty Trainee -Old Age Psychiatry, Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow, UK;Old Age Psychiatry, St John’s Hospital, West Lothian, UK;Scottish Dementia Clinical Research Network, Human Cognitive Neuroscience and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, University of Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, Edinburgh, UK;Translational Medicine, BioTherapeutics Clinical Programs, Pfizer, Inc, Cambridge, USA;

关键词: Alzheimer’s disease;    Mild cognitive impairment;    fMRI;    Medial temporal lobe;    Incidental memory;    Emotional memory;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-13-76

 received in 2012-05-31, accepted in 2013-02-27,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundRelative to intentional memory encoding, which quickly declines in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), incidental memory for emotional stimuli appears to deteriorate more slowly. We hypothesised that tests of incidental emotional memory may inform on different aspects of cognitive decline in MCI and AD.MethodsPatients with MCI, AD and Healthy Controls (HC) were asked to attend to emotional pictures (i.e., positive and neutral) sequentially presented during an fMRI session. Attention was monitored behaviourally. A surprise post-scan recognition test was then administered.ResultsThe groups remained attentive within the scanner. The post-scan recognition pattern was in the form of (HC = MCI) > AD, with only the former group showing a clear benefit from emotional pictures. fMRI analysis of incidental encoding demonstrated clusters of activation in para-hippocampal regions and in the hippocampus in HC and MCI patients but not in AD patients. The pattern of activation observed in MCI patients tended to be greater than that found in HC.ConclusionsThe results suggest that incidental emotional memory might offer a suitable platform to investigate, using behavioural and fMRI measures, subtle changes in the process of developing AD. These changes seem to differ from those found using standard episodic memory tests. The underpinnings of such differences and the potential clinical use of this methodology are discussed in depth.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Parra et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013