Alzheimer's Disease

Question 1

What are neurotic plaques? What do they do?

Answer 1

Extracellular Amyloid-B protein deposits.

Block cell transportation and transmission.

Question 2

What are neurofibrillary tangles? What do they do?

Answer 2

Intracellular Tau protein aggregates.

Disintegrate microtubules so block intracellular transportation and communication

Question 3

According to Braak, where do they tangles and plaques begin? What cortices are relatively spared?

Answer 3

The MTL.

Primary motor and sensory cortex.

Question 4

What are the memory deficits in early AD?

Answer 4

• anterograde episodic memory
• retrograde episodic memory
• subtle semantic memory impairment
• implicit memory: conceptual priming
• working memory (particularly dual-task performance)

Question 5

What is relatively preserved in early AD?

Answer 5

• Procedural memory
• perceptual priming
  (Both implicit memory)

Question 6

What memory deficit do patients tend to present with first?

Answer 6

Anterograde episodic memory deficits

Question 7

Salmon et al. (1989)

Answer 7

• mild and moderate AD patients vs healthy controls
• lost of words to remember
• 2s or 15s delay
• drastic reduction in ability to remember list

Question 8

Bayley et al. (2000)

Answer 8

• serial position curve
• AD patients no primacy but spared recency
• can’t encode new items into LTM

Question 9

Bartok et al (1997)

Answer 9

• AD patients impaired ability to recognise or recall newly encountered items
• impairment gets worse with disease progression (particularly in recall)

Question 10

Beatty et al (1988)

Answer 10

• memory for famous faces and public events from the past
• AD vs HD vs NC (young and old)
• AD impairment for more recent decades (both free recall and cued recall)
• temporal gradient of retrograde impairment (proportion of correct responses over decades)

Question 11

According to Bird and Burgess (2008), what does contextual memory entail?

Answer 11

Remembering the details of an episode. Requires recollection

Question 12

According to Bird and Burgess (2008), what does non-contextual memory entail?

Answer 12

Retrieval I’d stored information that is not tied to an episode. More akin to familiarity

Question 13

Describe familiarity

Answer 13

Knowing that you’ve experienced something before but can not recall the contextual details of the experience

Question 14

What two reasons have been proposed for the loss of semantic knowledge representations and conceptual priming in AD patients?

Answer 14

• The nature of the damage - more diffuse than amnesics

- The location of the damage - additional frontal and temporarietal damage

Question 15

What may working memory deficits in AD be due to?.

Answer 15

Frontal atrophy leading to executive dysfunction