Introduction: Informal caregivers for persons living with neurodegenerative disorders experience various types of stress and strain. Few studies have investigated the nature of caregiving concerns (“burdens”) and factors that contribute to those concerns, especially across multiple neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular disorders. Methods: The Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative (ONDRI) recruited participants with five neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular disorders (N = 504). Participants had study partners (family or friends) who provided information about themselves (e.g., the Zarit’s Burden Interview), as well as information about the clinical participants (e.g., activities of daily living). We used Correspondence Analysis to identify types of caregiving concerns in the Zarit’s, then identified relationships between those concerns and demographic, clinical, and cognitive measures.Results: We identified three components from the ZBI. The first was “overall burden” and was (1) strongly related to increases in neuropsychiatric symptoms and decreases in activities of daily living, (2) only moderately related to cognition, and (3) showed little-to-no differences between disorders. The second and third components revealed four types of caregiving concerns: current care of patient, future care of patient, personal concerns of study partner and social concerns of study partner. Discussion: We showed that caregiving concerns are multidimensional and individual experiences and emphasize the importance of support for the management of ADLs and neuropsychiatric symptoms, as well as individualized needs for caregiving assessment, education, training, and support strategies.
Language impairment in Parkinson’s disease (PD) may be attributable to motor and action/event knowledge deficits. We predicted that cognitively intact PD participants would be impaired in anticipating objects in sentences from event-based thematic fit information. Twenty-four PD and 24 healthy age-matched participants completed comprehensive neuropsychological assessments. We recorded participants’ eye movements as they heard predictive (The fisherman rocks the boat) and non-predictive baseline sentences (Look at the bathtub). Predictive sentences contained target, agent-related, verb-related, and unrelated images. Baseline sentences used phonologically and semantically unrelated distractors. We tested effects of group (PD/control) on gaze using growth curve models. There were no significant differences between PD and control participants in either sentence type, suggesting that PD participants successfully and rapidly use combinatory thematic fit information to predict upcoming language. Additionally, we conducted an exploratory analysis contrasting PD and controls’ performance on low motion content versus high motion content verbs. This analysis revealed fewer predictive fixations in high-motion sentences only for healthy older adults, suggesting that people with Parkinson’s disease may adapt to their disease by relying on spared, non-action-simulation-based language prediction and processing mechanisms. Given that multiple studies have shown that individuals with PD have difficulty processing verbs, it is highly surprising that they match healthy adults in their ability to use verb meaning to predict upcoming nouns.
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