Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by a progressive deterioration of various cognitive and behavioral abilities, and it also has a health impact on the patients' caregiver. Our aim was to determine the patient (and to a lesser extent the caregiver) characteristics that contribute most to the caregiver burden. We used the baseline data from the ICTUS study, a European longitudinal cohort of patients with mild to moderate AD. Data from 1091 patients and their caregivers was used for analysis. Three principal components analyses were performed on variables from the domains of cognition, neuropsychiatric symptoms, and daily function using the MMSE plus the ADAS-Cog, NPI, and IADL subscores, respectively. These were followed by a stepwise logistic regression to identify patient characteristics which best predict caregiver burden. The regression model (R2 = 0.35, p < 0.001) shows that the best explanatory variables are: 1) neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPI); 2) difficulties in the IADL; 3) time taken by caregiving; 4) demographic variables such as caregiver's age and patient sex; and 5) severity of cognitive impairment. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that although the strongest determinant of the caregiver burden is behavioral disturbance, the impact of the degree of cognitive impairment on burden is also significant.

The aim of this study was to compare the performance of elderly and young participants on a series of memory tasks involving either intentional or unintentional inhibitory control of memory content. Intentional inhibition processes in working and episodic memory were explored with directed forgetting tasks and in semantic memory with the Hayling task. Unintentional inhibitory processes in working memory, long-term memory and semantic memory were explored with an interference resolution task, the retrieval practice paradigm and the flanker task, respectively. The results indicate that elderly subjects' performance on the two directed forgetting tasks and the Hayling task is lower than that of young ones, and that this impairment is not related to their initial memory capacity. This suggests that there is a specific dysfunction affecting intentional inhibitory control of memory contents in normal aging.

Sophie Germain (1776–1831) was one of the first distinguished female mathematicians of the modern era. Largely self-taught, she won the admiration and friendship of Legendre and Gauss (whose work also appears in this series). Germain is best known for her work on number theory, notably Fermat's Last Theorem, but she played an important part in establishing the foundations of elasticity. This book, described by her slightly younger contemporary Navier as 'a work which few men are able to read and which only one woman was able to write', contains her research on the topic, which was awarded a prize by the Paris Academy of Sciences. This work was published in Paris in 1821.

Deficits in inhibitory abilities are frequently observed in normal aging. However, few studies have explored the generality of these deficits in a single group of participants. Here, we used an adaptation of the Simon task to differentially assess perceptual and motor inhibition using the same stimuli and task design and to determine whether these processes use separate or shared cognitive resources. We were interested in determining whether (1) normal aging is associated with the use of separate (as previously evidenced in young participants) or similar cognitive resources to perform perceptual and motor inhibition tasks; (2) older participants present a specific impairment in one of these two processes. Analyses of reaction times indicated that motor and perceptual inhibitory processes share some cognitive resources and both are impaired in normal aging. These results can be interpreted by considering that a dedifferentiation process is responsible for the inhibitory deficits presented by older participants.

cStaphylococcus aureus is an invasive bacterial pathogen, and antibiotic resistance has impeded adequate control of infections caused by this microbe. Moreover, efforts to prevent human infections with single-component S. aureus vaccines have failed. In this study, we evaluated the protective efficacy in rats of vaccines containing both S. aureus capsular polysaccharides (CPs) and proteins. The serotypes 5 CP (CP5) and 8 CP (CP8) were conjugated to tetanus toxoid and administered to rats alone or together with domain A of clumping factor A (ClfA) or genetically detoxified alpha-toxin (dHla). The vaccines were delivered according to a preventive or a therapeutic regimen, and their protective efficacy was evaluated in a rat model of osteomyelitis. Addition of dHla (but not ClfA) to the CP5 or CP8 vaccine induced reductions in bacterial load and bone morphological changes compared with immunization with either conjugate vaccine alone. Both the prophylactic and therapeutic regimens were protective. Immunization with dHla together with a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine used as a control did not reduce staphylococcal osteomyelitis. The emergence of unencapsulated or small-colony variants during infection was negligible and similar for all of the vaccine groups. In conclusion, addition of dHla to a CP5 or CP8 conjugate vaccine enhanced its efficacy against S. aureus osteomyelitis, indicating that the inclusion of multiple antigens will likely enhance the efficacy of vaccines against both chronic and acute forms of staphylococcal disease.

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Introduction: The benefit of cognitive rehabilitation (CR) for patients with early-stage Alzheimer disease (AD) remains difficult to assess. Method: An observational, prospective study was conducted in a sample of 52 patients with AD included in a clinical, individualized CR program. Cognitive rehabilitation consisted of 1 weekly session during 3 months at home, followed by 1 monthly contact for 9 months. Rehabilitation techniques were used by experienced therapists to adapt activities important for the patient. Evaluation of patient's dependence in activities and objective and subjective caregiver's burden was performed with a research quantitative scale immediately after the intervention and at 6-month and 1-year follow-up. Results: Analyses with repeated measure analysis of variance showed decreased patient's dependence for adapted activities at 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year. Objective and subjective percentage of caregiver's burden was also decreased at all evaluations with our research functional scale, while there was no change on Zarit's burden scale. Global cognition slightly decreased over 1 year. Conclusions: This observational study in a clinical setting is in line with the benefit of CR for patients with mild AD reported in recent randomized controlled trials. The benefit obtained for adapted activities remained after 1 year, even if global cognition declined. Moreover caregiver's burden related to all individually relevant daily activities (from a list of 98) evaluated within the CR program was decreased after 1 year. Those preliminary results emphasize the importance of choice for the measurement instrument to report CR efficacy and claim for further validation of such tools.

This study examined whether young children are influenced by the subjective experience associated with an easy or difficult recall when making memory decisions. Seventy-one children, aged 4, 6, and 8 years, were asked to generate either a small (easy condition) or large (hard condition) number of first names. Statistical analyses revealed that participants in the hard condition were more likely to infer that they did not know many names than participants in the easy condition, contrary to what would be expected if children based their memory judgement on the objective number of recalled items. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that children as young as 4 years old rely on the subjective experience of ease to regulate their decision-making processes. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.