Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) demonstrate a sensitive and specific short-term memory impairment for visual bindings (e.g. the combination of shapes and colours) that is absent in healthy ageing (Parra et al., 2009) and other dementias (Della Sala et al., 2012). This impairment is also seen in cases of asymptomatic, familial AD (Parra et al., 2010). The visual short term memory binding (VSTMB) impairment in AD has clear clinical and neuropsychological implications which are investigated in this thesis. Firstly, the utility of the VSTMB paradigm was contrasted with the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Task with Immediate Recall (FCSRT-IR) – which has recently been posited as a useful diagnostic marker of AD pathology (Dubois et al., 2014). The results indicated that the former is not affected by age, where the latter is, suggesting that the VSTMB paradigm provides a suitable baseline to measure cognitive decline associated with AD. The development of a parallel version of the FCSRT-IR is also reported. Secondly, a 24-week longitudinal study of patients receiving treatment for AD (donepezil hydrochloride) revealed that patients who respond to this treatment on cognitive scales also experience change in VSTMB performance. These responders, however, did not significantly improve on the FCSRT-IR during the study. This suggests that anticholinergic treatment may have an effect on VSTMB performance. Additionally, a meta-analysis that investigates the effect of a study’s funding on donepezil RCT outcome showed that industry-funded studies report larger changes in cognition than independent studies. Lastly, an auditory binding experimental paradigm was developed, with a view to reveal a non-visual binding impairment in AD, investigating whether the binding impairment reflects a general or modality-specific memory impairment. The overall conclusions of this thesis confirm that the VSTMB impairment has significant promise as an index of AD. The auditory binding paradigm, by contrast, shares conceptual similarity with the VSTMB paradigm, but may have restricted clinical use within the AD patient population.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:735530 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Killin, Lewis Oliver Jack |
| Contributors | Abrahams, Sharon ; Della Sala, Sergio ; Starr, John |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25963 |
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