Researchers at the University of Cambridge found that dementia patients are more likely to be unable to adapt to their environment because of damage to brain areas called multiple demands networks.
The study was published in Journal of Neuroscience.
Researchers analyzed data from 75 dementia patients to determine if adapting to changes in the environment was one of the core symptoms.
The patients assessed either had Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, or other types of dementia.
What the findings determined: “Multiple demand regions displayed increased functional but decreased effective connectivity as a function of neurodegeneration, suggesting ineffective compensation.”
“Overall, we show that damage to any of the nodes of the multiple demand network is sufficient to impair top-down control of sensation, providing a common mechanism for impaired change detection across dementia syndromes,” the authors concluded in their findings.
