Myers Catherine E, Kluger Alan, Golomb James, Ferris Steven, de Leon Mony J, Schnirman Geoffrey, Gluck Mark A
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA.
J Geriatr Psychiatry Neurol. 2002 Summer;15(2):82-90. doi: 10.1177/089198870201500206.
Specific reductions in hippocampal volume in nondemented elderly individuals with mild cognitive impairment have been shown to correlate with future development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Hippocampal atrophy (HA) is also correlated with cognitive impairments, leading to the promise of behavioral markers for early AD. Prior theoretical work has suggested that hippocampal dysfunction may selectively impair generalization involving novel recombinations of familiar stimuli. In this study, nondemented elderly individuals were trained on a series of concurrent visual discriminations and were then tested for transfer when stimulus features were recombined in new ways. Presence or absence of HA, revealed by neuroimaging, was not correlated with concurrent discrimination performance; however, individuals with mild HA showed significant decreases in transfer performance relative to nonatrophied participants. These preliminary results suggest that even very mild degrees of hippocampal atrophy may be associated with subtle behavioral impairments.
在轻度认知障碍的非痴呆老年人中，海马体体积的特定减少已被证明与阿尔茨海默病（AD）的未来发展相关。海马萎缩（HA）也与认知障碍相关，这为早期AD的行为标志物带来了希望。先前的理论研究表明，海马功能障碍可能选择性地损害涉及熟悉刺激的新重组的泛化能力。在这项研究中，对非痴呆老年人进行了一系列同时进行的视觉辨别训练，然后在刺激特征以新方式重新组合时测试其迁移能力。通过神经成像显示的HA的存在与否与同时进行的辨别表现无关；然而，轻度HA的个体相对于未萎缩的参与者在迁移表现上有显著下降。这些初步结果表明，即使是非常轻微程度的海马萎缩也可能与细微的行为损害有关。
