NCT03070821

Therapy of Alzheimer's Disease With Neurofeedback

Neurofeedback and Follow-up With Real-time fMRI to Investigate Cognitive Function in Patients of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer's Disease (AD)

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 30 (actual)
• Sponsor: University Hospital, Aachen · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 50 Years – 80 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The project aims to investigate in patients of Alzheimer's disease in a prodromal state (early state of the disease) compared to healthy subjects whether neurofeedback training with functional MRI (fMRI) can improve cognitive ability. It is of interest if voluntary modulation of brain activation with real-time (rt) fMRI as a novel method affects cognitive ability, as well as functional and structural measures of the brain. Over the course of the study subjects will learn a real-world footpath. During neurofeedback training subjects are then asked to recall this footpath while simultaneously trying to modulate their own brain activation based on feedback. Feedback is given about the parahippocampal gyrus - a region of the brain associated with episodic and visuo-spatial memory, which is known to be affected early by Alzheimer's disease pathology. Before and after the training cognitive ability is assessed using neuropsychological tests mainly measuring numerous domains of memory. The investigators hypothesise that the training leads to an improvement of the trained cognitive domain, but also induces changes in brain structure and function.

Conditions

• Alzheimer Dementia (AD)
• Elderly

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	rtfMRI neurofeedback training	Information about the state of brain activation was given to subjects. That information was visualised as a thermometer bar. Subjects tried to modulate that activation while performing a mental imagery task.
DEVICE	3T MRI	A 3T Siemens MRI scanner was used to implement rtfMRI neurofeedback training.

Timeline

• Start date: 2013-01-30
• Primary completion: 2016-06-30
• Completion: 2016-06-30
• First posted: 2017-03-06
• Last updated: 2017-03-06