There is an urgent need to develop a practical and reliable clinical measure of disease progression in early and mild MS. We hypothesized that a test of sound lateralization, which is exquisitely sensitive to transmission delays in auditory brainstem, could be more useful for detecting processing speed deficits in mildly impaired MS subjects than standard cognitive tasks. Objective. To develop ...

OBJECTIVE To determine how cortical compensation occurs in higher cognitive systems during the recovery phase of diffuse axonal injury (DAI). DESIGN 12 right-handed patients with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) lesion pattern compatible with pure DAI were identified. Pure DAI was defined as finding of traumatic microbleeds on T2*-weighted gradient-echo images in the absence of otherwise tr...

Observers perceive objects in the world as stable over space and time, even though the visual experience of those objects is often discontinuous and distorted due to masking, occlusion, camouflage, or noise. How are we able to easily and quickly achieve stable perception in spite of this constantly changing visual input? It was previously shown that observers experience serial dependence in the...

OBJECTIVES To determine if antenatal exposure to betamethasone for the prevention of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome alters psychological functioning and health related quality of life in adulthood. DESIGN Follow-up of the first and largest double blind, placebo controlled, randomised trial of a single course of antenatal betamethasone for the prevention of neonatal respiratory distres...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to investigate the prevalence and pattern of cognitive dysfunction observed in primary Sjögren's syndrome (PSS) and to examine the relationships between cognitive abilities, depression, fatigue, and quality of life. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty-two subjects with PSS were compared with 19 healthy controls on comprehensive neuropsychological, depressio...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the cognitive skills of patients with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), secondary progressive MS (SPMS), and primary progressive MS (PPMS) relative to healthy control subjects and to assess whether there is heterogeneity in the type of cognitive disabilities demonstrated by patients with different MS phenotypes. METHODS RRMS patients (n = 108), SPMS patie...

BACKGROUND Patients with chronic pain (CP) are often reported to have deficits in working memory. Pain impairs working memory, but so do depression and sleep problems, which are also common in CP. Depression has been linked to changes in brain activity in CP during working memory tasks, but the effect of sleep problems on working memory performance and brain activity remains to be investigated....

Background Patients with progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) often have cognitive impairment in addition to physical impairment. The burden of cognitive and physical impairment progresses over time, and may be major determinants of quality of life. The aim of this study was to assess to which degree quality of life correlates with physical and cognitive function in progressive MS. Methods Thi...

BACKGROUND Cognitive training has been shown to improve cognitive function and quality of life in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and is correlated with increased activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). OBJECTIVE This study aims to test whether combining attention training with anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS) over the left DLPFC can improve traini...

BACKGROUND Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) is characterized by optic neuritis and longitudinally extensive acute transverse myelitis. The brain is generally considered healthy in NMO, though very recent studies have demonstrated that magnetic resonance imaging abnormalities may be observed in various brain regions of NMO patients. To date, cognitive functions have never been investigated in NMO. O...