A Korean version of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Packet (CERAD-K) was created. The English-American version of CERAD clinical and neuropsychological assessment batteries was translated into Korean, and the psychometrical properties of the cognitive tests in the CERAD-K were established. In the translation, including back-translation, the basic structures of all measures in the original CERAD batteries were maintained. The CERAD-K was administered in a standardized manner to 106 dementia patients (aged 70.4 +/- 8.1 years), including 78 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, and 186 controls (aged 68.4 +/- 4.6 years) who were recruited from 3 university hospitals and 2 elderly welfare centers. The cognitive tests in the CERAD-K successfully differentiated controls from the dementia patients and from the AD patients. They also showed substantial interrater reliability and 1-month test-retest reliability. The CERAD-K is an equally reliable and valid equivalent for the English version of the CERAD clinical and neuropsychological assessment batteries.
This study aimed to explore the effects of age, education and gender on the performance of eight tests in the Korean version of the CERAD neuropsychological assessment battery and to provide normative information on the tests in the Korean elderly. The battery was administered to 618 healthy volunteers aged from 60 to 90. People with serious neurological, medical and psychiatric disorders, including dementia, were excluded. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed to assess the relative contribution of the demographic factors on the score of each cognitive test. Age, education, and gender were found to have significant effects on the performance of many tests in the battery. Based on these results, 4 overlapping age normative tables (60 to 74, 65 to 79, 70 to 84, and 75 to 90 years of age) with 3 educational strata (0 to 3 years, 4 to 6 years, and 7 years and more) for both genders are presented. The normative information will be useful for a clinical interpretation of the CERAD neuropsychological battery in Korean elderly as well as for comparing the performance of the battery across countries.
Cortical rhythms have been thought to play crucial roles in our cognitive abilities. Rhythmic activity in the beta frequency band, around 20 Hz, has been reported in recent studies that focused on neural correlates of attention, indicating that top-down beta rhythms, generated in higher cognitive areas and delivered to earlier sensory areas, can support attentional gain modulation. To elucidate functional roles of beta rhythms and underlying mechanisms, we built a computational model of sensory cortical areas. Our simulation results show that top-down beta rhythms can activate ascending synaptic projections from L5 to L4 and L2/3, responsible for biased competition in superficial layers. In the simulation, slow-inhibitory interneurons are shown to resonate to the 20 Hz input and modulate the activity in superficial layers in an attention-related manner. The predicted critical roles of these cells in attentional gain provide a potential mechanism by which cholinergic drive can support selective attention.
Generating a comprehensive description of cortical networks requires a large-scale, systematic approach. To that end, we have begun a pipeline project using multipatch electrophysiology, supplemented with two-photon optogenetics, to characterize connectivity and synaptic signaling between classes of neurons in adult mouse primary visual cortex (V1) and human cortex. We focus on producing results detailed enough for the generation of computational models and enabling comparison with future studies. Here, we report our examination of intralaminar connectivity within each of several classes of excitatory neurons. We find that connections are sparse but present among all excitatory cell classes and layers we sampled, and that most mouse synapses exhibited short-term depression with similar dynamics. Synaptic signaling between a subset of layer 2/3 neurons, however, exhibited facilitation. These results contribute to a body of evidence describing recurrent excitatory connectivity as a conserved feature of cortical microcircuits.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.