碩士 / 高雄醫學大學 / 心理學系碩士班 / 103 / Background and Goal: Dementia is a clinical syndrome, which affects the patient’s cortical function and causes the degeneration and abnormality of lots of cognitive functions, influencing severely the intelligence that has finished being developed. Alzheimer disease is the most common type of dementia, and also a kind of neurodegenerative disease that is irreversible for now. The commonest earlier symptom is that it will worsen the patient’s memory, making him or her unable to memorize new things. And with the progression of disease, many cognitive functions will be influenced, such as the deficit of the ability of visual organization. In this study, we mainly discuss the relation between Visual Organization Test and the metabolism of cerebral glucose, and examine the differences in the metabolism of cerebral glucose between AD patients and the normal control when they were doing the test. The hypothesis of the study includes: (1) in the HVOT, the scores which the AD patients get are significantly lower than those which the normal control get; (2) due to the temporal resolution of PET/CT, it cannot acquire the immediate difference in metabolic rate of cerebral glucose between before the stimulation and after it; therefore, the study speculate the normal control’s relation between the difference of metabolic rate of glucose in visual pathway (dorsal and ventral) and the scores they get in the HVOT is not significant; (3) because of AD patients’ metabolism of cerebral glucose in baseline is lower than normal control, there would be significant activation of it when AD patients are doing the HVOT; ventral pathway is impaired more severely than dorsal pathway is, so the difference of metabolic rate of glucose in dorsal pathway would be significantly positively related to the scores of the HVOT.
Method: We divided the participants into two groups: the experiment group and the control group. The experiment group included 10 mild Alzheimer patients (CDR=0.5 or 1), while the control group was composed of 11 normal control. In the study, the ability of visual organization was measured by Hooper Visual Organization Test, and we used FDG Positron Emission Tomography (FDG PET/CT) to measure the metabolism of cerebral glucose, in which each participant required to be evaluated twice: baseline and testing. The baseline was to measure the metabolism of cerebral glucose during the resting state, while the testing was to be given to Visual Organization Test as stimulation so that we could see the activating degree of cerebral glucose.
Result: Compared to normal control, AD patients performed significantly worse in the Visual Organization Test. In baseline, compared to normal control’s, AD patients’ metabolic rates of glucose in frontal, temporal, associative visual cortex, posterior cingulated cortex, pons, left anterior cingulate cortex, left Broca’s region were significantly lower. In addition, after comparing the difference of metabolic rates of cerebral glucose between AD patients and normal control before doing the HVOT (baseline) and after doing it (testing), we found that AD patients’ difference of metabolic rates of cerebral glucose between before and after the HVOT was positively related to the scores of the test. These cerebral regions include left middle frontal cortex, left inferior parietal cortex, left Broca’s region, left posterior cingulated cortex, left parietotemporal cortex, right primary visual cortex, right and left thalamus, whereas the normal control’s did not relate to the metabolism of cerebral glucose in all brain regions.
Conclusion: In the study, we found out that the AD patients’ ability of visual organization positively related to the brain regions mentioned previously. Therefore, we presume when the patients were doing Hooper Visual Organization Test, the ability they were utilizing included spatial location, language, vision, working memory, and other high-order information integration. This study is a pilot for the AD patients’ condition of metabolism of cerebral glucose when they are doing the visual organization test through FDG Positron Emission Tomography (FDG PET/CT).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/103KMC05071004 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Yi-Zhen Wu, 吳懿真 |
| Contributors | Ching-Kuan Liu, 劉景寬 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | zh-TW |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 101 |
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