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PARTNERS IN RESEARCH: CNDR || IOA || UDALL || Penn ADC
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Executive Difficulty in Parkinson's Disease with Dementia

Project Description

2010 Progess Report Parkinson's disease studies at Penn

Advances in Past Year

Publications
Murray GrossmanMurray Grossman, MD, EdD
Project Leader

Project Description

2010 Progress Report Update

Research dictionaryExecutive resources like planning and organization are crucial for day-to-day conversation. Without these resources, communicative efficacy is lost. There are major consequences to these difficulties, and activities of daily living suffer immensely.

In our project, we will be examining the organization of discourse. There are large-scale speech samples. We will also be examining the comprehension of organizational components of scripts, that is, story-like stimuli. In addition to studies of difficulties in patients, we will be Penn Udall Center for Parksinson's Research Public Health Statementassessing the neural basis for these difficulties by correlating their speech and comprehension impairments with structural MRI studies of the brain. Finally, we will be using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to assess the neural basis for these organizational components of speech and comprehension inhealthy young adults.

Significant Scientific Advances in the Past Year

The results from the past year emphasize the specific cognitive and language deficits of patients with DLB/PDD, illustrate differences in the quality of the cognitive impairment in DLB compared to PDD, and provide important information concerning the role of executive disorders in language and communication.

Publications