Active clinical trials for "Alzheimer Disease"

This study aims to evaluate impacts of an emotion recognition rehabilitation program, named Training of Affect Recognition, on social cognition abilities in Alzheimer's disease (AD). In addition, we hypothesis that the effect of this rehabilitation will also evolve gaze strategies, behavioral disorders, and the caregiver's burden.

The purpose of this study is to pilot test a telehealth Advance Care Planning (ACP) intervention among those with either mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or unrecognized dementia. Our goal is to pilot-test and evaluate a pragmatic Telehealth ACP intervention among patients with either the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or unrecognized dementia.

Presentation & Pre-screening of the control group / reminiscence group Patient/resident pre-screening team meeting for the study Explanation and proposal of the study to patients and their families Signature of resident/patient and family consents Audit of inclusion and non-inclusion criteria Inclusion Medical advice for VR Clinical interview with the family or legal guardian for an accurate life history + an anamnesis interview (psychologist or doctor) with the patient or resident. Creation of video contents Creation of personalized video contents Clinical scales review Evaluation of the number of psychotropic molecules prescribed (coordinating doctor, general practitioner, geriatrician) Pre-test phase with the patient for the use of the VR headset Randomisation Session procedure As previously mentioned, the virtual reality sessions will take place in a quiet setting twice a week in the living or hosting residence. The sessions will be hold over a period of time of 6 weeks. Each subject of the reminiscence group will have two personalised virtual surroundings (after data being collected from team and/or families). The virtual environment will change every 3 weeks in order to avoid the phenomenon of habituation. The subjects of the control group will be exposed to two generic virtual settings (beach, mountain etc.) with a different virtual environment every 3 weeks. During the session, note will be taken on the subject's speech. The session will also be filmed and/or recorded with a prior signed agreement by the patient or his representative. - Last session (S6) Review of clinical scales (re-testing) Re-evaluation of drug prescriptions

There is an important unmet need for timely, non-invasive, and low-burden evaluation of patients presenting with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early dementia. MCI impacts 12-18% of people in the United States over age 60 and is often an initial clinical sign of Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Alzheimer's Association, 2022). The PrecivityAD test is an analytically and clinically validated blood test that aids healthcare providers in the diagnosis of AD in patients with MCI and early-stage dementia. C2N has created a quality improvement (QI) survey to gather insight from clinicians as to the clinical effectiveness of the commercially available PrecivityAD™ test, which identifies whether a patient with signs and symptoms of cognitive decline is likely to have amyloid plaques in the brain, a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.

This retrospective study is a more extensive, confirmatory analysis of the cognitive and functional outcomes initially seen in 2 groups of MCI/dementia patients in Springfield, MA and compares specialized dementia care and a comprehensive treatment approach versus usual care delivered in a non-specialist setting. The first group of patients (n= 328) was seen by a dementia specialist, who utilized a standardized assessment and treatment protocol (CNS). This included comprehensive identification and treatment of hypoxia, sleep-disorders, and other cognitively-impairing metabolic conditions as well as maximally- dosed FDA-approved medications for dementia, depression, and PBA. The second group of patients (n= 280) was seen by non-dementia specialists in the community and received usual care which did not include comprehensive assessment or treatment of underlying metabolic derangements or maximal utilization of currently available medications. This study, evaluating date from a larger cohort (n>800) of specialist-treated cognitively-impaired patients, will further examine the hypothesis that a comprehensive dementia treatment protocol yields cognitive stabilization and/or improvement using already available dementia drugs when compared with usual community care.

Because of the lengthening of life expectancy, more and more people are concerned with the effects of aging on their mental faculties (e.g., memory decline) and with the possibility of getting Alzheimer's Disease (AD) or other forms of dementia. This increasing awareness of AD has already resulted in a growing demand for neuropsychological testing. AD's research also emphasizes the need for early screening to improve the prediction of the disease progression and the efficacy of any future therapy. Such a drive to screen for pre-dementia raises the challenging issue of frontline identification of individuals in the preclinical or early clinical stages of AD. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is typically considered to be the prodromal state of AD, and is therefore at the core of the drive for early screening. Moreover, Pre-MCI so called SCI (Subjective Cognitive Impairment) can precede AD for 15 years. However, many individuals diagnosed with MCI do not convert to AD, some remaining stable and others even reversing back to normal (with rates of reversion to normal varying from 4.5% to as high as 53%). This over-diagnosis bias, which has been largely overlooked, is at the core of the present project at the interface of human and life sciences. Here, we argue that an important source of overdiagnosis in the prodromal state of AD comes from negative aging stereotypes (e.g., the culturally shared beliefs that aging inescapably causes severe cognitive decline and diseases such as AD) that permeate neuropsychological screening. There is ample evidence in the laboratory that such stereotypes contribute to the differences observed in the healthy population between younger and older adults in explicit memory tasks. Additionally, three pilot (lab) studies specifically conducted for the present ANR project showed that the threat of being judged stereotypically undermines the controlled use of memory of healthy older adults and simultaneously intensifies their automatic response tendencies, resulting in impaired memory performance. The present proposal goes several steps further by examining for the first time whether aging stereotypes are powerful enough to implicitly permeate the clinical neuropsychological testing and thus inflate memory deficits in older adults judged "at risk" (based on either epidemiological criteria or memory complaints), resulting in false-positive detection of SCI and MCI. This provocative hypothesis will be tested while 1) using biomarkers of neurodegeneration to distinguish false-positives from true MCI, and 2) using biomarkers of stress to examine whether and how aging stereotypes can lead to acute physiological stress during neuropsychological testing. This innovative project has the potential to offer new recommendations to improve the diagnosis accuracy of prodromal state of AD, with positive consequences for older people's wellbeing.

The purpose of this study is to determine if there is improvement or measurable change in cognition after only one month of treatment with donepezil when using a computerized test battery. The results at one month will be compared with the results at 3 months to evaluate this.

Longitudinal observational study of cognitive functions, physical health and biological parameters in the whole population living in Abbiategrasso born between 1935 and 1939,1773 subjects, followed for six years in order to know the prevalence and the incidence of dementia and risk and protective factors of normal and pathological mental aging. The peculiarities of this study that must assure the outcome efficacy are: Selected age: since 70-75 years old people represents a transition age from adulthood to old age, it is of special interest to study the evolution of psychic and physical functions of this population Whole population not a sample study Location: the small area involved (Abbiategrasso is a town of 30.000 inhabitants)can contribute to guarantee more homogeneity among the subjects and reduce undesired variability multidimensional assessment(biological, clinical, social, psychological data collected) After initial screening, the recruited population will be followed up for two more times (every two years )

The purpose of this clinical research study is to determine if a specific genetic allele is involved with the development of agitation in patients with late-onset Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The study will compare the results of genetic testing between two groups: individuals with late-onset AD who show signs of agitation and individuals with late-onset AD who do not show signs of agitation.

This study is a comparison of 3 learning techniques, Errorless learning, modelling and trial and error, in the relearning of IADL of Alzheimer patients from mild to moderately severe dementia. Tailored IADL will be chosen for each patient (n=300) and trained in individualized sessions for 6 weeks. This study focuses on the relationship between learning techniques, IADL and memory processes, in a threefold way: it will determine which of the of the three learning techniques (EL, MR, TE) will improve most the (re)learning of instrumental skills in different dementia stages using a randomized controlled trial; it will explain the role of implicit and explicit memory mechanisms in the (re)learning of IADL tasks; and as a secondary objective, it will explore the possible drug treatment by behavioral intervention interaction effects of the three learning techniques.