Dementia is a broad category of brain
diseases that cause a long-term and often gradual decrease in the ability to
think and remember that is great enough to affect a person’s daily functioning.
Memory loss is one typical example. In fact, many dementias are progressive,
meaning symptoms start out slowly and gradually get worse. Various factors can
cause behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). And stress is
one of the most potent of many factors that can cause expression of behavioral
and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). If a patient with dementia
is coping with stress, the autonomic nervous system becomes dominated by sympathetic
nervous-adrenal medullary (SAM) activity. This study aimed to
clarify the causal relationship between BPSD and autonomic nervous system
activity by making a theoretical model in which BPSD influencing autonomic
nervous system activity, analyzing the model using SEM, and examining the
standardization coefficient.
In this study, the
authors recruited 35 participants diagnosed with dementia from nearby geriatric
health service facilities. The Neuropsychiatric Inventory was used for the
evaluation of BPSD, and a TAS 9 VIEW (manufactured by YKC) was used for the
heart rate variability analysis to measure autonomic nervous system activity. They
also constructed a model in which the autonomic nervous system comprised a
category and performed a structural equation modeling analysis to calculate the
standardization coefficient and correlation coefficient for each factor. And
the authors assessed the data from the model for fitness with the goodness of
fit index (GFI), adjusted goodness of fit index (AGFI), and root-mean-square
error of approximation (RMSEA). Analyses were performed using the Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 25 (SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL,
USA) and SEM was performed using SPSS Amos 19.0 (SPSS, Inc.).
Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s tests were performed to determine
whether the factor analysis using 10 variables was suitable. The level of
significance was set at a p-value of less than 5%.
The results showed
that the influence of BPSD suppressed sympathetic nervous system activity and
enhanced parasympathetic nervous system activity. In
addition, this study shows that it is necessary to pay attention to not only
sympathetic nervous system activity, but also parasympathetic nervous activity
when measuring autonomic nervous system activity for stress in dementia.
Article by Daisuke
Kimura, et al, from Japan.
Full access: http://mrw.so/1EIEbe
Image by Kim Noce, from Flickr-cc.
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