NCT06566651

Emotion Processing Among Patients With ALS

Emotion and Interoception Processing in ALS

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 180 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of Aarhus · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The goal of this observational study is to learn about the emotional perception in people with ALS disease compared to people with other neuromuscular disease and healthy controls. The main questions it aims to answer are: * How people with ALS judge happy and angry faces and what their "insight" into these judgements are like * How their autonomic responses differ from the other two test group Participants will asked to judge if a face presents a happy emotion or angry emotion. Researchers will compare the ALS group responses with neuromuscular diseases group and healthy control group responses to see if the ALS group judge more happy faces than angry.

Detailed description

Mild cognitive and behavioral changes occur in 35% of ALS patients and 10-15% of patients meet the criteria for FTD1-4. Recent research suggests changes in emotional perception and social cognition are a part of the neuropsychological changes in ALS, possibly associated with cognitive and behavioral symptoms seen in ALS-FTD5-9. The aim of this project is to investigate emotional perception in ALS patients compared to healthy controls and patients with other neuromuscular diseases that do not affect the central nervous system. We use a simple emotion discrimination task to evaluate emotional bias and metacognition of emotion discrimination. Moreover, this project aims to explore the correlation between emotion perception and autonomic reactivity in ALS patients by recording heart rate frequency and respiration frequency during the EDT. The project will contribute with deeper insights to the neuropsychological changes in ALS patients and the opportunity to quantify these changes. Thereby, the project will add new perspectives to the discussion of how we evaluate socio-emotional aspects of ALS in both clinical decision-making, guidance of relatives and future research.

Conditions

• Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
• Neuromuscular Diseases
• ALS
• Motor Neuron Disease
• MND (Motor Neurone DIsease)

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Emotion Discrimination Task (EDT)	It estimates the subjective bias and sensitivity in discriminating between happy and angry facial expressions of different intensities of emotional expression

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-12-15
• Primary completion: 2026-06-30
• Completion: 2026-06-30
• First posted: 2024-08-22
• Last updated: 2024-08-22

Locations

2 sites across 1 country: Denmark