Rehabilitation of Facial Emotion Recognition in Alzheimer's Disease

Association de Recherche Bibliographique pour les Neurosciences16 enrolled

Overview

EYE-TAR(AD+) is an observational study based on the same design as the princeps EYE-TAR(MA) study, but with a larger number of patients and including an additional evaluation of Facial emotion recognition (based on a more ecological material), in order to reinforce conclusions of the study EYE-TAR(MA) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.npg.2020.08.003. The main objective is to confirm that facial emotion recognition can be improved in AD using the "Training of Affect Recognition program" (TAR). The Secondary Objectives are to: Evaluate the impact of the "Training of Affect Recognition program" (TAR) on oculomotor behavior in a situation of social cognition, on behavioral disorders and on caregiver burden. Confirm that improvement in facial emotion recognition is related to modification of observation strategies. Confirm the link between improved recognition of facial emotions, reduced behavioral disorders and caregiver burden.

Study Type

OBSERVATIONAL

Enrollment

Conditions

Alzheimer's Dementia (AD)Family Caregivers

Interventions

AD-TAR

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 Years

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * Male or Female. * AD diagnosed according to l'IWG-2 (Dubois \& al. 2014) criteria, * Mini-Mental State (MMS-E) ≥15 * Subject accompanied by a family caregiver and whose participation in a cognitive stimulation workshop was recommended in Memory Centre of the RAINIER Centre (Princesses Grace Hospital - Monaco) * Written informed consent signed by patient and family caregiver. Exclusion Criteria: * General anaesthesia within 3 months. * History of psychiatric and/or neurological disorder (other than the diagnosed neurodegenerative pathology); * History of alcoholism or drug addiction * Ophthalmological or neurological problems preventing a video-oculography examination. * Oculomotor disorders such as "fixation disorders" or "ocular tracking disorders". * Cognitive disorders of the neurovisual type (visual agnosia, prosopagnosia, visuo-spatial disorder or visuo-perceptual disorder) or aphasia.

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Facial emotion recognition (FER) performances

Change from Baseline and Comparison of FER performance between AD-TAR group and AD-Cognitive Stimulation group. Evaluation criteria: Scores to Ekman Faces task (1976). FER was assessed using pictures from the Ekman Faces task (1976), to test the recognition of the six facial basic emotions and neutral faces. There were four pictures per emotion, for a total of 28. For each picture, participants were asked to select one of the seven labels (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise and neutral), with a maximum of 8 seconds of response time per picture.