RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Social cognition helps people to understand their own and others' behavior and to modulate the way of thinking and acting in different social situations. Rapid and accurate diagnoses of neurodegenerative diseases are essential, as social cognition is affected by these diseases. The Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (RSMS) is a scale that detects social-emotional cognition deficits. AIM: The aim of the current study is to examine how socioemotional parameters are affected by neurodegenerative diseases and whether the RSMS can discern these disorders based on the socioemotional parameters in the Greek population. METHODS/DESIGN: A total of 331 dementia subjects were included. Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (Revised, ACE-R) measurements were used in order to assess the cognitive deficits. The Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) was used for the evaluation of the neuropsychiatric symptoms. The RSMS and its two subscales was used in order to detect the socioemotional deficits. RESULTS: The RSMS and its two subscales (RSMS_EX and RSMS_SP) can effectively detect neurodegenerative diseases. The RSMS can detect bvFTD in Alzheimer's Disease (AD), AD in a healthy cohort, behavioral variant Frontotemporal Dementia (bvFTD) in a healthy cohort, bvFTD in Parkinson's Disease (PD) and Frontotemporal Semantic Dementia (FTD/SD) in a healthy cohort. It is a useful tool in order to detect frontotemporal dementias. RSMS correlated negatively with the NPI questionnaire total and the subcategories of apathy, disinhibition and eating disorders. The RSMS results are associated with the ACE-R score (specifically verbal fluency). CONCLUSIONS: The RSMS is a helpful tool in order to identify socioemotional deficits in neurodegenerative dementias. It is also a useful scale that can discern bvFTD and svPPA in AD patients. A worse RSMS score correlates with a worse ACE-R and NPI. It seems to be a useful scale that can reliably measure social behavior in non-reversible neurodegenerative disorders, such as AD, FTD (bvFTD, svPPA), PDD and PD. The results also apply to the Greek population.
RESUMO
Patients with neurodegenerative disease show distinct patterns of personality change, some of which may be traced to focal neurological damage, whereas others may be mediated by cultural reactions to functional impairment. Although such changes are early and pervasive in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), and milder changes are seen in Alzheimer disease (AD), no study has examined all Big 5 factors of personality in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients. In addition, the influence of culture and ethnicity on disease-related personality changes has seldom been examined. Premorbid and current personality were measured in 47 Greek patients with bvFTD, AD, and MCI on the basis of informant reports using the Traits Personality Questionnaire 5, a 5-factor inventory in the Greek language that accounts for Greek cultural factors. bvFTDs showed greater decreases in conscientiousness compared with ADs and MCIs. ADs and MCIs showed increased neuroticism, whereas the bvFTD patients were rated as having become much less neurotic in the course of their disease. The pattern of personality change in MCIs was very similar to that of ADs, supporting recent evidence that personality changes occur as early as the MCI disease stage. In all the groups, personality changes were similar to those previously described in non-Mediterranean cultures, supporting the hypothesis that they may result directly from disease-specific neurological processes.
