Biological and psychological predictors of cognitive function in breast cancer patients before surgery.

PURPOSE: Research suggests that cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI) can occur before breast cancer (BC) treatment. The limited extant evidence suggests the underlying mechanisms could be stress-related. Potential psychological and biological predictors of CRCI prior to any BC treatment were examined. METHODS: 112 treatment-naïve women with BC and 67 healthy controls (HC) completed a neuropsychological test battery to assess cognitive impairment and a self-report battery to assess cognitive complaints, cancer-related stress, depressive and anxiety symptoms. Morning and evening cortisol and α-amylase were collected from saliva. Multilinear regressions were conducted. RESULTS: Treatment-naïve BC patients were more frequently impaired in verbal memory and processing speed and reported more cognitive complaints (all p < .001) than HC. BC patients and HC did not differ in overall cognitive impairment (p = .21). Steeper α-amylase, lower cancer-related stress and younger age was associated with better overall cognitive function in treatment-naïve BC patients. Higher depressive symptoms predicted higher levels of cognitive complaints in BC patients. CONCLUSION: Overall, these findings suggest that stress plays a role in CRCI. This study is the first to associate α-amylase with cognitive function in cancer patients, informing future research. The findings on impairment in processing speed and verbal memory among treatment-naïve BC highlight the need to screen for such impairments among BC patients and indicate that future studies on CRCI should include baseline assessments prior to BC treatment. If replicated, these findings could inform the development and testing of appropriate interventions to decrease CRCI among cancer patients. CLINICAL TRIALS REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT04418856, date of registration: 06.05.2020.

Assessing Cognitive Workload Using Cardiovascular Measures and Voice.

Monitoring cognitive workload has the potential to improve both the performance and fidelity of human decision making. However, previous efforts towards discriminating further than binary levels (e.g., low/high or neutral/high) in cognitive workload classification have not been successful. This lack of sensitivity in cognitive workload measurements might be due to individual differences as well as inadequate methodology used to analyse the measured signal. In this paper, a method that combines the speech signal with cardiovascular measurements for screen and heartbeat classification is introduced. For validation, speech and cardiovascular signals from 97 university participants and 20 airline pilot participants were collected while cognitive stimuli of varying difficulty level were induced with the Stroop colour/word test. For the trinary classification scheme (low, medium, high cognitive workload) the prominent result using classifiers trained on each participant achieved 15.17 ± 0.79% and 17.38 ± 1.85% average misclassification rates indicating good discrimination at three levels of cognitive workload. Combining cardiovascular and speech measures synchronized to each heartbeat and consolidated with short-term dynamic measures might therefore provide enhanced sensitivity in cognitive workload monitoring. The results show that the influence of individual differences is a limiting factor for a generic classification and highlights the need for research to focus on methods that incorporate individual differences to achieve even better results. This method can potentially be used to measure and monitor workload in real time in operational environments.

Psychological characteristics in women football players: Skills, mental toughness, and anxiety.

Women's football has been far less studied than men's. This work's objectives were to: (1) analyze the differences in psychological skills, mental toughness (MT), and anxiety in women football players according to their level (national team, first division, and second division); and (2) predict those three levels (using a multivariate model) according to the players' psychological skills, mental toughness, and anxiety. One hundred and forty-two Icelandic women football players (23.5 ± 3.5 years) participated in the study. They were classified into three groups according to their level: national team, and first and second divisions. Three questionnaires were used: the Test of Performance Strategies Questionnaire, the Sport Mental Toughness Questionnaire, and the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 questionnaire. A one-way ANOVA with Bonferroni post hoc correction was used to examine differences between teams. Applying a classification tree analysis, the participants were classified into three groups according to their level. There were few differences between the three groups in psychological skills, but in mental toughness and anxiety the national team had the highest and lowest values respectively, and the first and second division players differed in relaxation in competition (TOPS), total score and confidence (SMTQ), and worry (SAS-2). The classification tree correctly classified 54.9% of the sample with the variables total score (SMTQ) and activation in practice (TOPS). Therefore, given the relevance that psychological attributes appear to have for women football players' performance, it would seem indispensable to incorporate the figure of the sports psychologist into national and club teams.

Adolescent habitual caffeine consumption and hemodynamic reactivity during rest, psychosocial stress, and recovery.

OBJECTIVE: Most adolescents regularly consume caffeine. Whereas observational studies have suggested that coffee may be cardio-protective, pharmacological experimentation with adults shows that caffeine at dietary doses increases blood pressure, thereby implicating regular caffeine consumption as a potential source of harm for cardiovascular health. The present study was in response to the dearth of caffeine research among younger consumers. It was hypothesised that compared to the consumption of little or no caffeine, adolescents who habitually consume caffeine have overall higher blood pressure and increased vascular resistance. METHOD: Using a quasi-experimental design, continuous measurements of blood pressure, cardiac output, and total peripheral resistance were taken non-invasively from adolescents (n = 333) aged 14-15 years and 18-19 years who reported "low", "moderate", or "high" levels of caffeine intake. Measurements were conducted when participants generally had negligible or low systematic caffeine levels while at rest, during stress, and during recovery from stress. RESULTS: Whereas habitual caffeine consumption did not predict blood pressure level, higher caffeine intake was associated with modestly increased vascular resistance during all phases of the experiment (i.e., at rest, during stress, and during recovery from stress). CONCLUSIONS: Present findings are important because they suggest that early exposure to caffeine may lead to persistent increases in vascular resistance, which in turn is an acknowledged risk factor for the development of hypertension. These results highlight the need for further studies of adolescents to determine the robustness of any persistent caffeine-related hemodynamic effects, and the implications such effects could have for long-term cardiovascular health.

The role of working memory in supporting drivers' situation awareness for surrounding traffic.

OBJECTIVE: To link working memory to driver situational awareness (SA) for surrounding traffic. BACKGROUND: Operating a motor vehicle is a complex activity that requires drivers to maintain a high level of SA. Working memory has been conceptually linked to SA; however, the roles of working memory subsystems in supporting driver SA is unclear. METHOD: Participants drove a simulated vehicle and monitored surrounding traffic while concurrently performing either visuospatial- or phonological-load tasks. Drivers' SA was indexed as the ability to recall the positions of the surrounding traffic relative to their own vehicle at the end of each trial. RESULTS: In Experiment I, a visuospatial task interfered with drivers' ability to recall the positions of traffic located in front of their vehicle. In contrast, a phonological task interfered with drivers' ability to recall the positions of traffic located behind their vehicle. Experiment 2 confirmed and extended the findings of Experiment I with the use of different visuospatial- and phonological-load tasks. CONCLUSION: Visuospatial and phonological codes play a role in supporting driver SA for traffic located in the forward view and the rear view, respectively. APPLICATION: Drivers' SA for surrounding vehicles is disrupted by concurrent performance on secondary tasks. The development and implementation of new in-cabin communication, navigation, and informational technologies needs to be done with the knowledge that components of drivers' working memory capacity may be exceeded, thereby compromising driving safety.