Regional cerebral perfusion abnormalities based on SPECT are detectable before development of the clinical symptoms of AD in carriers of the PS-1 mutation.

There is a surge of studies confirming that old age spares the ability to bind in visual working memory (VWM) multiple features within singular object representations. Furthermore, it has been suggested that such ability may also be independent of the cultural background of the assessed individual. However, this evidence has been gathered with tasks that use arbitrary bindings of unfamiliar features. Whether age spares memory binding functions when the memoranda are features of everyday life objects remains less well explored. The present study investigated the influence of age, memory delay, and education, on conjunctive binding functions responsible for representing everyday items in VWM. We asked 32 healthy young and 41 healthy older adults to perform a memory binding task. During the task, participants saw visual arrays of objects, colours, or coloured objects presented for 6 s. Immediately after they were asked either to select the objects or the colours that were presented during the study display from larger sets of objects or colours, or to recombine them by selecting from such sets the objects and their corresponding colours. This procedure was repeated immediately after but this time providing a 30 s unfiled delay. We manipulated familiarity by presenting congruent and incongruent object-colour pairings. The results showed that the ability to bind intrinsic features in VWM does not decline with age even when these features belong to everyday items and form novel or well-known associations. Such preserved memory binding abilities held across memory delays. The impact of feature congruency on item-recognition appears to be greater in older than in younger adults. This suggests that long-term memory (LTM) supports binding functions carried out in VWM for familiar everyday items and older adults still benefit from this LTM support. We have expanded the evidence supporting the lack of age effects on VWM binding functions to new feature and object domains (i.e., everyday items). We have confirmed that education does not negatively impact on such ability at old age. Such results have important implications for the selection of culturally unbiased tests to screen for abnormal ageing trajectories.

This study replicated the associations previously reported in populations of European ancestry and shows that APOE variants have a regulatory role on the effect that variants in other loci have on LOAD, reflecting the importance of gene-gene interactions in the etiology of neurodegenerative diseases.

Our results are consistent with the presence of variants of African origin in the genome of the Colombian population and different from APOE[Latin Small Letter Open E]4 that represents a risk factor for the development of LOAD, whereas variants of Native American origin may be conferring protection. However, unknown environmental factors or epigenetic differences among continental groups could also explain the observed associations.

Recently, the global burden of disease study, presented by the world health organization, call the attention of the research community, showing that trauma still remains as a major public health problem in Central and South America.1 Within the large spectrum of this problem, one of the most specific injuries associated with disability and death is head trauma. Unfortunately, research groups evaluating integral aspects of the management of this disease and seeking to reduce their impact on society are scarce in this region of the world.2 Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Cuba are among the few countries that are engaged in research in neurotrauma. Few basic and clinical studies have been performed multicentric in our region and most of the used evidence in the comprehensive management of this disease, comes from studies conducted in Europe and North America. In these regions, care systems differ in key aspects such available resources for advanced neuromonitoring at intensive care units. Recently a study performed in Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, generated international controversy due to the implications of their results in the treatment protocols of severe head trauma.3After deep analysis of the results of this study in several meetings of traumatic brain injury experts and after extensive academic discussions published in different biomedical journals, it was considered that this study, with a very good methodological approach, failed trying to understand the ecology of the medical management in environments with slightly different views of advanced care.4-8These patients were managed under non traditional high income health care settings; due to this, interpretation of advanced monitoring to generate intervention decisions, could be influenced by the idiosyncrasies and pre-existing conditions in different health systems and training resources.This interesting experience, coming from this trial, should provide an opportunity for neurotrauma research groups in Latin America (where large volumes of patients are generated by our social conflicts), closing a gap, where ecology of patient care inside different systems of each region (which may even have variation within the same state), need to be taken into account in further clinical studies.