Many good news came up these last few weeks. During my PhD in Caen (with Gaël Chételat) and post doc in Berkeley (with Bill Jagust), I had the opportunity to collaborate on multiple projects… that just led to three great publications on (very) different topics!
Audrey Perrotin, PhD (Inserm u1077, Caen) our queen of meta-memory, studied the neural underpinnings of anosognosia in patients with AD at the dementia stage; after two rounds of thorough review and great responses, the paper finally got accepted in the Annals of Neurology. Her approach combines smart metrics to assess anosognosia (“delta score”) and multimodal imaging (FDG-PET and resting-state fMRI) to identify associated brain alterations. The article is available here.
Perrotin A, Desgranges B, Landeau B, Mézenge F, La Joie R, Egret S, Pélerin A, de la Sayette V, Eustache F, Chételat G (in press). Anosognosia in Alzheimer’s disease: disconnection between memory and self-related brain networks. ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY
Florent Besson, MD (Inserm u1077, Caen) analyzed the data from cognitively intact elders and assessed their status regarding the three main AD neuroimaging biomarkers (MRI, FDG-PET and beta-amyloid-PET). He looked at cognitive and cerebral correlates of biomarker positivity. This paper was just accepted in The Journal Of Neuroscience.
Besson FL, La Joie R, Doeuvre L, Gaubert M, Mézenge F, Egret S, Landeau B, Barré L, Abbas A, de la Sayette V, Desgranges B, Eustache F, Chételat G (in press). Cognitive and brain profiles associated with each neuroimaging biomarker in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. THE JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Rik Ossenkoppele, PhD (UCSF) did a great job combining MRI data from the memory and aging center in UCSF and the VU medical center in Amsterdam. He assessed the patterns of atrophy in patients who are commonly refered to as having “frontal AD” (with predominant behavioral and/or dysexecutive symptoms), and compared them to both typical AD and bvFTD (behavioral variant Fronto-Temporal Dementia). This huge paper includes clinical data, neuroimaging (MRI) and neuropathology. I was involved in the MRI data preprocessing and analyzing; with Jacob Vogel, we adapted the W-score map approach I developed in a former paper (La Joie et al., J Neurosci 2012) to the current sample to obtain 3D brain maps indicating which brain regions were frequently atrophied in each clinical group. The paper will soon be available in Brain.
Renaud La Joie 