Designing with and for People with Dementia: Wellbeing, Empowerment and Happiness is the International Conference 2019 of the MinD Consortium, the DRS Special Interest Group on Behaviour Change and the DRS Special Interest Group on Wellbeing and Happiness, hosted by the Technische Universität Dresden, in Dresden, Germany. The conference proceedings provide trans-disciplinary contributions for researchers, practitioners, end-users and policy makers from the design and health care professions in terms of new findings, approaches and methods for using design to improve dementia care and to support people with dementia and their carers. The conference has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 691001, and from the DFG German Research Foundation.

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The global population with dementia is rapidly increasing around the world.The major risk factor for dementia is aging. There is currently no treatmentavailable and the cost of symptomatic treatment is high. There is a growinginterest in possible clinical applications of non-invasive methods that are safeand easy-to-perform in diagnosis of dementia. The purpose of this paper is toinvestigate the usage of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) withelectroencephalography (EEG) to diagnose dementia in early stages of thedisease. Early diagnosis is needed to reduce the costs of symptomatic care.When investigating the usage of TMS-EEG technology, we will look at how wecan distinguish dementia in different neurodegenerative diseases between eachother. More research is needed to suggest an accurate parameters fordiagnosis of dementia with this type of technology.

Background: The impact of genetic polymorphisms on cognition is assumed to increase with age as losses of brain resources have to be compensated for. We investigate the relation of catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) p.Val158Met polymorphism and cognitive capacity in the course of adult development, healthy aging and the development of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in two birth cohorts of subjects born between 1930 and 1932 or between 1950 and 1952. Methods: Thorough neuropsychological assessment was conducted in a total of 587 participants across three examination waves between 1993 and 2008. The COMT genotype was determined as a restriction fragment length polymorphism after PCR amplification and digestion with Nla III. Results: Significant effects of the COMT p.Val158Met polymorphism were identified for attention and cognitive flexibility in the younger but not the older cohort. Conclusion: These results confirm the importance of the COMT p.Val158Met genotype on tasks assessing attention and cognitive flexibility in midlife but not in healthy aging and the development of MCI. Our findings suggest that the influence of COMT changes as a function of age, decreasing from midlife to aging.

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Yes / To determine whether or not jugular venous reflux (JVR) is associated with structural brain parenchyma changes in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). 16 AD patients (mean (SD): 81.9 (5.8) years), 33 MCI patients (mean (SD): 81.4 (6.1) years) and 18 healthy elderly controls (mean (SD): 81.5 (3.4) years) underwent duplex ultrasonography and magnetic resonance imaging scans to quantify structural brain parenchyma changes. Normalized whole brain (WB), gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) volumes were collected, together with CSF volume. JVR was strongly associated with increased normalized WB (p = 0.014) and GM (p = 0.002) volumes across all three subject groups. There was a trend towards increased WB and GM volumes, which was accompanied by decreased CSF volume, in the JVR-positive subjects in both the MCI and AD groups. When the MCI and AD subjects were aggregated together significant increases were observed in both normalized WB (p = 0.009) and GM (p = 0.003) volumes for the JVR-positive group. No corresponding increases were observed for the JVR-positive subjects in the control group. Through receiver operating characteristic analysis of the brain volumetric data it was possible to discriminate between the JVR-positive and negative AD subjects with reasonable accuracy (sensitivity = 71.4%; specificity = 88.9%; p = 0.007). JVR is associated with intracranial structural changes in MCI and AD patients, which result in increased WB and GM volumes. The neuropathology of this unexpected and counterintuitive finding requires further investigation, but may suggest that JVR retrogradely transmits venous hypertension into the brain and leads to brain tissues swelling due to vasogenic edema.

One particular challenge of brain connectomics deals with inferring differences in the brain due to diseases such as Alzheimer's. More specifically, structural connectomics aims at investigating the connectivity between regions in the brain based on the distribution of neuronal fibers. The first step in generating structural connectomes is to perform tractography reconstruction on diffusion MRI (dMRI) data, to extract the most likely pathways of neural fibers. However, current tractography reconstruction algorithms suffer from having high sensitivity and low specificity. Thus, the following steps  of creating, analyzing and deriving graphs metrics from connectivity maps based on tractography impair the reliable assessment of structural connectivity. A promising method to improve tractography and subsequent structural connectomes is to apply tractogram filtering methods. In this study, the impact of tractogram filtering on structural connectomics and derived graph measures of subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), specifically using spherical-deconvolution informed filtering of tractograms (SIFT), is experimentally examined. Moreover, the study also aims at inferring the effects of tractogram filtering in machine-learning based classification of the aforementioned structural connectomes. The pipeline in this experimental setup uses registration tools from FSL, tractography tools from MRTrix3Tissue as well as Keras for classification. The results from the given experiments show, that graph measures such as nodestrength and betweenness centrality are altered for the individual nodes. This leads to new connectomes with nodes, which are more important after tractogram filtering. This effect was also seen in connectomes weighted by fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD) and radial diffusivity (RD). Moreover, structural connectomes based on filtered tractograms yield a higher classification performance. The best classification performance was reached with 88.65% on raw connectomes. Limiting factors in this experimental setup are identified as the small number of subjects at hand and computation time and the errors introduced by image registration and tractography parameterization.

Research has demonstrated that everyday functional abilities are compromised in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a transitional stage between normal cognitive aging and dementia, as well as in healthy aging. These functional changes have been shown to be strong predictors of future decline, highlighting their importance. However, early changes in everyday functioning remain poorly characterized, largely due to a scarcity of sensitive measures capable of detecting subtle disruption. Recent research suggests that eye-tracking methodology may be effective in addressing this gap. Fifty-two participants (27 younger adults and 25 non-demented older adults) completed a novel eye-tracking task involving passive viewing of a naturalistic scene and verbalization of a task goal (e.g., make coffee, pack a lunch). Participants also completed a performance-based measure of everyday action that required them to enact the same tasks (e.g., coffee, lunch) that were included in the eye-tracking paradigm, self-report measures of functional ability, and neuropsychological measures. Mixed ANOVAs were conducted to examine group (young, old) and condition (passive viewing, verbalization)/task (simple, complex) effects on eye-tracking and everyday action performance. Independent samples t-tests/Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted to examine group differences in eye-tracking and everyday action performance. Correlation analyses across all measures were conducted to evaluate the potential mechanisms of eye-tracking and everyday action results. Results showed no significant group differences in the primary eye-tracking variables, but both groups made a lower proportion of fixations to distractor (i.e., non-target) objects during task verbalization compared to passive scene viewing. Older adults made more inefficient actions during performance-based everyday task completion, particularly when task demands were high. Eye tracking and everyday action variables were related to different measures of self-reported functional ability. Finally, eye-tracking variables were primarily related to neuropsychological measures of executive functions/working memory, whereas everyday action performance was most strongly related to measures of verbal learning and memory. These findings suggest that age-related functional changes at the level of eye movements may occur after changes in behavioral performance of everyday tasks. Importantly, performance-based assessment of everyday action appears sensitive to age-related decline. Additionally, naturalistic eye movements and everyday task performance may reflect distinct components of self-reported functioning and may be driven by distinct cognitive processes. Future research with refined naturalistic eye-tracking tasks and samples with a wider range of impairment is necessary to further explore these findings and improve characterization and detection of risk for dementia. / Psychology

Background: Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is seen as a state between normal aging and dementia, with patients having an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other sorts of dementia. MCI has been linked to a change in gut microbiota which impacts the microbiota-gut-brain axis (MGBA), consequently affecting neurological functions. A way of altering microbiota and thereby promoting cognitive health is through the administration of prebiotics, probiotics, and synbiotics. Aim: This systematic literature review aims to assess the impact of prebiotics, probiotics, and synbiotics on MCI by compiling existing data on the matter. Methods: Three databases - Web of Science, Cochrane, and PubMed - were searched and articles were included based on the following inclusion criteria: (1) randomized clinical trials (RCTs), (2) conducted on adults evaluated with MCI during the study, (3) including a prebiotic, probiotic, or synbiotic intervention of any kind, (4) comparing the intervention with a placebo or control group, (5) written in English, (6) reporting the main outcome of cognitive function using any neuropsychological evaluation test. Results: Five studies were included in the final selection. These studies showed that cognitive function improved after probiotic intervention, significantly affecting several cognitive domains: attention, calculation, orientation in time, and delayed memory. Two studies showed that subjects with low cognitive scores at baseline benefited more from probiotic supplementation compared to high-scoring subjects. Conclusions: Probiotics appear to improve cognition in MCI subjects; however, further research is needed to conclude the effects of prebiotics and synbiotics.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia defined by loss in memory and cognitive abilities severe enough to interfere significantly with daily life activities. Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a clinical condition in which an individual has memory deficits not normal for the individual's age, but not severe enough to interfere significantly with daily functioning. Every year, approximately 10-15% of individuals with MCI will progress to dementia. Currently, there is no treatment to slow or halt AD progression, but research studies are being conducted to identify causes that can lead to its earlier diagnosis and treatment. Genetic variation plays a key role in the development of AD, but not all genetic factors associated with the disease have been identified. Copy number variants (CNVs), a form of genetic variation, are DNA regions that have added genetic material (duplications) or loss of genetic material (deletions). The regions may overlap one or more genes possibly affecting their function. CNVs have been shown to play a role in certain diseases. At the start of this work, only one published study had examined CNVs in late-onset AD and none had examined MCI. In order to determine the possible involvement of CNVs in AD and MCI susceptibility, genome-wide CNV analyses were performed in participants from three cohorts: the ADNI cohort, the NIA-LOAD/NCRAD Family Study cohort, and a unique cohort of clinically characterized and neuropathologically verified individuals. Only participants with DNA samples extracted from blood/brain tissue were included in the analyses. CNV calls were generated using genome-wide array data available on these samples. After detailed quality review, case (AD and/or MCI)/control association analyses including candidate gene and genome-wide approaches were performed. Although no excess CNV burden was observed in cases compared to controls in the three cohorts, gene-based association analyses identified a number of genes including the AD candidate genes CHRFAM7A, RELN and DOPEY2. Thus, the present work highlights the possible role of CNVs in AD and MCI susceptibility warranting further investigation. Future work will include replication of the findings in independent samples and confirmation by molecular validation experiments.