Disturbances of spatial vision and object vision correlate differently with regional cerebral glucose metabolism in Alzheimer's disease.
There is evidence of two neuronal systems for visual cognition which are referred to as spatial vision and object vision. We subjected 49 patients with mild-to-moderate probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) to tasks associated with these two types of visual cognition. Visual counting was employed as a task to assess visuospatial recognition. Identification of overlapping figures and discrimination of visual forms were used as visuoperceptual tasks that require an ability to recognize objects. Regional cerebral glucose metabolism (rCMRglc) of the subjects was also determined by positron emission tomography. Multivariate statistics controlling for the confounding factors assessed the correlation between the task performances and the rCMRglc. The visual counting score significantly correlated with the metabolic rate of the bilateral inferior parietal lobules. On the other hand, the scores of the visuoperceptual tasks significantly correlated with the metabolic rate of the right middle temporal gyrus and the right inferior parietal lobule. The present study showed that visuospatial disturbance was related to bilateral parietal metabolism, and that visuoperceptual disturbance was related to right temporo-parietal metabolism in patients with mild-to-moderate AD.
Fujimori
M
M
Division of Clinical Neurosciences, Hyogo Institute for Aging Brain and Cognitive Disorders, 520 Saisho-ko, Himeji, 670-0981, Japan. fujimori@hiabcd.go.jp
Imamura
T
T
Hirono
N
N
Ishii
K
K
Sasaki
M
M
Mori
E
E
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000378:metabolism*; D005260:Female; D005947:Glucose / Q000378:metabolism*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000378:metabolism; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000378:metabolism; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D013028:Space Perception; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000378:metabolism; D014055:Tomography, Emission-Computed; D014786:Vision Disorders / Q000378:metabolism / Q000503:physiopathology*
D005947:Glucose