Deans' stroke musings: Apathy in Parkinson's disease is related to executive function, gender and age but not to depression

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Apathy in Parkinson's disease is related to executive function, gender and age but not to depression

Does apathy in stroke have the same basis? Whom is going to research the answer? Or is this another thing our stroke medical world is punting on?
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnagi.2014.00350/full?
Antonia Meyer¹,

Ronan Zimmermann¹,

Ute Gschwandtner¹,

Florian Hatz¹,

Habib Bousleiman^1,2,

Nadine Schwarz¹ and

Peter Fuhr¹^*

¹Clinical Neurophysiology, Department of Neurology, Hospital of the University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
²Epidemiology and Public Health, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

Deficits in executive functions occur in up to 93% of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Apathy, a reduction of motivation and goal-directed behavior is an important part of the syndrome; affecting both the patients as well as their social environment. Executive functions can be subdivided into three different processes: initiation, shifting and inhibition. We examined the hypotheses, (1) that apathy in patients with Parkinson's disease is only related to initiation and not to shifting and inhibition, and (2) that depression and severity of motor signs correlate with apathy. Fifty-one non-demented patients (19 = female) with PD were evaluated for apathy, depression and executive functions. Executive function variables were summarized with an index variable according to the defined executive processes. Linear regression with stepwise elimination procedure was used to select significant predictors. The significant model (R² = 0.41; p < 0.01) revealed influences of initiation (b = −0.79; p < 0.01), gender (b = −7.75; p < 0.01), age (b = −0.07; p < 0.05) and an age by gender interaction (b = 0.12; p < 0.01) on apathy in Parkinson's disease. Motor signs, depression and level of education did not influence the relation. These results support an association of apathy and deficits of executive function in PD. Initiation strongly correlates with apathy, whereas depression does not. We conclude, that initiation dysfunction in a patient with Parkinson's disease heralds apathy. Apathy and depression can be dissociated. Additionally, apathy is influenced by age and gender: older age correlates with apathy in men, whereas in women it seems to protect against it.