Why the study?
Does early Alzheimer's Disease impair sympathetic nervous system responses to cognitive effort and upright posture compared to healthy older adults?
Does early Alzheimer's Disease impair sympathetic nervous system responses to cognitive effort and upright posture compared to healthy older adults?
Early Alzheimer's Disease is associated with a specific defect in sympathetic nervous system function linked to cognitive effort.
Early AD may selectively impair sympathetic responses to mental effort; hypothesis-generating and requires prospective confirmation before clinical use.
Sympathetic nervous system responses to a cognitive challenge and a physiologic stimulus (upright posture) were compared in 10 patients with early Alzheimer's Disease and a group of healthy older adults. Plasma catecholamine and cardiovascular responses to upright posture were similar in the two groups. However, sympathetic activation during mental effort was impaired in the patient group; this difference did not appear to be attributable to motivational factors. Alzheimer's Disease is associated with a defect in sympathetic nervous system function that is specifically linked to cognitive effort and appears early in the course of the disease.
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Borson et al. (1989) studied this question.
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