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Background: Cognitive impairment in Huntington's disease (HD) is a key driver of disability that can have deleterious impacts on everyday functioning. Currently available patient-reported outcome measures may not adequately capture the impact of HD-related cognitive impairment on daily life, particularly higher-order executive functioning (i.e., processing information, decision making, multi-tasking, planning, etc.).
Objective: To address the unmet need to better quantify the functional sequelae of HD-related cognitive impairment by developing the Huntington's Disease Everyday Functioning (Hi-DEF) scale.
Methods: Qualitative interviews were conducted in two adult cohorts (25-65 years) with early stages of HD (i.e., huntingtin [] gene carriers with self-reported cognitive complaints but could still function independently). Cohort 1 included 10 dyads of participants with HD and their care partners, who completed concept elicitation interviews to identify cognitive challenges impacting everyday tasks, which was used to design a draft item-set. Cohort 2, which included 15 additional participants with HD, cognitively debriefed this item-set.
Results: In Cohort 1, issues with executive functioning were reported 32 times by participants with HD and 22 times by care partners, and challenges with functioning were reported 46 times by participants with HD and 20 times by care partners. Based on these reports, the Hi-DEF scale was developed and cognitive debriefing interviews evaluated its content validity, relevance, clarity, interpretation, and acceptability. Psychometric validation of the Hi-DEF scale is reported elsewhere.
Conclusions: These interviews revealed the impact of HD-related cognitive impairment on everyday functioning and supported the content validity, relevance, clarity, interpretation, and acceptability of the Hi-DEF scale.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/18796397241289044 | DOI Listing |
Neurology
October 2025
Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.
Background And Objectives: The relationship between insomnia and cognitive decline is poorly understood. We investigated associations between chronic insomnia, longitudinal cognitive outcomes, and brain health in older adults.
Methods: From the population-based Mayo Clinic Study of Aging, we identified cognitively unimpaired older adults with or without a diagnosis of chronic insomnia who underwent annual neuropsychological assessments (z-scored global cognitive scores and cognitive status) and had quantified serial imaging outcomes (amyloid-PET burden [centiloid] and white matter hyperintensities from MRI [WMH, % of intracranial volume]).
Gerontologist
September 2025
Department of Child Development and Family Studies, College of Human Ecology, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea.
Background And Objectives: Volunteering has cognitive benefits in later life and has been theorized to protect against Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). A small but growing body of volunteer programs target people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI)-who are presumably at elevated risk for ADRD, but we know surprisingly little about who volunteers with MCI and how volunteering affects their subsequent cognitive changes. The current study sought to address these gaps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci
September 2025
Institute of Gerontology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, United States.
Objectives: In this study, we examined the extent to which older adult social activity participation and perceptions of neighborhoods correspond with risks of cognitive impairment and no dementia (CIND) and dementia.
Methods: We predicted the risk of both CIND and dementia in a series of Cox proportional hazards analyses among older adults across a ten-year period. Utilizing data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS, N = 15,020), we examined whether social activity participation corresponded with reduced risk of CIND and dementia, as well as whether perceptions of neighborhood conditions, social cohesion, and neighborhood disorder moderated the effects of social activity participation.
Brain
September 2025
Departamento de Fisiología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Granada, 18016 Granada, Spain.
Primary coenzyme Q (CoQ) deficiency is a mitochondrial disorder with variable clinical presentation and limited response to standard CoQ10 supplementation. Recent studies suggest that 4-hydroxybenzoic acid (4-HBA), a biosynthetic precursor of CoQ, may serve as a substrate enhancement treatment in cases caused by pathogenic variants in COQ2, a gene encoding a key enzyme in CoQ biosynthesis. However, it remains unclear whether 4-HBA is required throughout life to maintain health, whether it offers advantages over CoQ10 treatment, and whether these findings are translatable to humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE J Biomed Health Inform
September 2025
Vision Transformer (ViT) applied to structural magnetic resonance images has demonstrated success in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). However, three key challenges have yet to be well addressed: 1) ViT requires a large labeled dataset to mitigate overfitting while most of the current AD-related sMRI data fall short in the sample sizes. 2) ViT neglects the within-patch feature learning, e.
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