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Dr Elie Mater
The perception of time is altered in people with lewy body dementia and may have diagnostic utility, new research shows.
Presenting his findings during the ANZAN 2019 Young Investigator Session, Dr Elie Matar, a Dementia and Movement Disorders Fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney, said cognitive fluctuations – defined as spontaneous and marked variation in cognitive function – were considered a core symptom of Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB).
“In the initial criteria of DLB in 1992 it was a sine qua none, meaning that you weren’t allowed to call someone a person with DLB if they didn’t have cognitive fluctuations – that’s how important [this symptom] is to this particular disorder,” he told ANZAN delegates.
“But it’s really hard to diagnose because we don’t have any particularly good objective markers to measure cognitive fluctuations,” he said.
The aim of his current study was to explore the utility of interval timing as a paradigm for understanding the psychology, and potentially, the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive fluctuations in DLB.
The research group used a simple paradigm adapted from an Oxford group that looked at time perception in three parts: time estimation, time production and time pacing.
In the time estimation task, 25 patients with probable DLB and 14 controls were given a random interval of time of either 10, 30 or 60 or 90 seconds and at the end of that interval were asked to indicate how long they thought that time was.
In the second set of experiments, participants were asked to estimate intervals of time, again measured in seconds, and say ‘Stop’ when they thought the time period had passed.