Furey, Maura L. and Pietrini, Pietro and Haxby, James V. and Alexander, Gene E. and Lee, H.C. and Van Meter, J. and Grady, Cheryl L. and Shetty, Umesha and Rapoport, Stanley I. and Schapiro, Mark B. and Freo, Ulderico Cholinergic stimulation alters performance and task-specific regional cerebral blood flow during working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 94 (12). pp. 6512-6516. ISSN 1091-6490 (1997)
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Abstract
Modulation of the cholinergic neurotransmitter system results in changes in memory performance, including working memory (WM), in animals and in patients with Alzheimer disease. To identify associated changes in the functional brain response, we studied performance measures and regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) using positron emission tomography (PET) in healthy subjects during performance of a WM task. Eight control subjects received an infusion of saline throughout the study and 13 experimental subjects received a saline infusion for the first 2 scans followed by a continuous infusion of physostigmine, an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, for the subsequent 8 scans. rCBF was measured using H215O and PET in a sequence of 10 PET scans that alternated between rest and task scans. During task scans, subjects performed the WM task for faces. Physostigmine both improved WM efficiency, as indicated by faster reaction times, and reduced WM task-related activity in anterior and posterior regions of right midfrontal gyrus, a region shown previously to be associated with WM. Furthermore, the magnitudes of physostigmine-induced change in reaction time and right midfrontal rCBF correlated. These results suggest that enhancement of cholinergic function can improve processing efficiency and thus reduce the effort required to perform a WM task, and that activation of right prefrontal cortex is associated with task effort.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry |
| Research Area: | Computer Science and Applications |
| Depositing User: | Caterina Tangheroni |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Apr 2016 09:10 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Apr 2016 09:10 |
| URI: | http://eprints.imtlucca.it/id/eprint/3417 |
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