the relationship between associative learning, transfer generalization, and homocysteine levels in mild cognitive impairment联想学习之间的关系,概括转移和同型半胱氨酸水平在轻度认知障碍.pdfVIP

The Relationship between Associative Learning, Transfer Generalization, and Homocysteine Levels in Mild Cognitive Impairment 1 2 2 3,4 2 Ahmed A. Moustafa *, Doaa H. Hewedi , Abeer M. Eissa , Catherine E. Myers , Hisham A. Sadek 1 School of Social Sciences and Psychology Marcs Institute for Brain and Behaviour, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2 Psychogeriatric Research Center, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, 3 Department of Psychology, Rutgers University-Newark, Newark, New Jersey, United States of America, 4 NeuroBehavioral Research Laboratory, Department of Veterans Affairs-New Jersey Health Care System, East Orange, New Jersey, United States of America Abstract Previous studies have shown that high total homocysteine levels are associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In this study, we test the relationship between cognitive function and total homocysteine levels in healthy subjects (Global Dementia Rating, CDR = 0) and individuals with MCI (CDR = 0.5). We have used a cognitive task that tests learning and generalization of rules, processes that have been previously shown to rely on the integrity of the striatal and hippocampal regions, respectively. We found that total homocysteine levels are higher in MCI individuals than in healthy controls. Unlike what we expected, we found no difference between MCI subjects and healthy controls in learning and generalization. We conducted further analysis after diving MCI subjects in two groups, depending on their Global Deterioration Scale (GDS) scores: individuals with very mild cognitive decline (vMCD, GDS = 2) and mild