Carola Roßmeier

• Medical Doctor at Kliniken des Bezirks Oberbayern

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is an atypical Parkinsonian syndrome characterized initially by falls and eye movement impairment. This multimodal imaging study aimed at eliciting structural and functional disease-specific brain alterations. T1-weighted and resting-state functional MRI were applied in multi-centric cohorts of PSP and matched h...

Background and objectives: German legislation establishes advance directives (ADs) as legally binding instruments that all involved parties need to adhere to. This applies also to family members who have been authorized as official surrogates of the AD's author. As surrogates, they are expected to make sure that the AD is being implemented. Our st...

The scholarly debate on advance directives (ADs) in the context of dementia is mainly built around ethical arguments. Empirical studies that shed light into the realities of ADs of persons living with dementia are few and far between and too little is known about the effect of national AD legislation on such realities. This paper offers insight int...

Importance: The behavioral and cognitive symptoms of severe psychotic disorders overlap with those seen in dementia. However, shared brain alterations remain disputed, and their relevance for patients in at-risk disease stages has not been explored so far. Objective: To use machine learning to compare the expression of structural magnetic resona...

Background: Guidelines for the treatment of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) recommend that if antipsychotics are necessary, these should be used only for a limited time and with the lowest possible dose. Objective: In order to raise awareness of the risks of antipsychotic treatment in patients with dementia and the resul...

Background Polypharmacy is common in people with dementia. The use of psychotropic drugs (PDs) and other, potentially inappropriate medications is high. The aims of this cross-sectional study were 1) to investigate the use of drugs in people with advanced dementia (PWAD), living at home or in long term care (LTC); 2) to focus on PD use; and 3) to i...

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) may present with three distinct clinical sybtypes: semantic variant PPA (svPPA), nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA (nfvPPA), and logopenic variant PPA (lvPPA). Objective: The aim was to examine the utility of the German version of the Repeat and Point (R&P) Test for subtyping patients with PPA. Metho...

Background and Objectives: Data on suicidal ideation, behavior and the risk factors in patients with dementia is scarce. To evaluate the prevalence of death wishes, suicidal ideation, and suicidal behavior of young (YOD) and late onset dementia (LOD) and to identify risk factors for suicidal ideation and behavior. Methods: We interviewed 157 family...

Objective Motor speech disorders (MSDs) are characteristic for nonfluent primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). In PPA of the semantic (svPPA) and of the logopenic type (lvPPA), speech motor function is considered typically intact. However, knowledge on the prevalence of MSDs in svPPA and lvPPA is mainly based on studies with a priori knowledge of P...

Background Advanced stages of dementia are characterized by severe cognitive and physical impairment. It has not yet been investigated whether persons with young onset dementia (YOD) and late onset dementia (LOD) differ in advanced disease stages. Objectives To compare quality of life (QoL) between persons with advanced YOD and LOD; to explore the...

Objective: We sought to characterise C9orf72 expansions in relation to genetic ancestry and age at onset (AAO), and to use these parameters to discriminate the behavioural from the language variant syndrome, in a large pan-European cohort of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) cases. Methods: We evaluated expansions frequency in the entire...

Objective: The aims of our study were to describe the clinical phenotype and to characterize the cerebral glucose metabolism patterns as measured with fluordesoxyglucose-positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) in symptomatic FTLD-patients with different GRN variants. Methods: For this study, data were included from all patients (n = 10) of a single-...

Background: Since people with advanced dementia are usually not able to make complex decisions, it is usually the family caregivers, as proxies, who have to decide on treatments and their termination. However, these decisions are difficult for the caregivers to make, as they are often inadequately informed and cannot properly assess the consequenc...

The applause sign, i.e., the inability to execute the same amount of claps as performed by the examiner, was originally reported as a sign specific for progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). Recent research, however, has provided evidence for the occurrence of the applause sign in various conditions. The aim of this study was to determine the preval...

The applause sign, i.e., the inability to execute the same amount of claps as performed by the examiner, was originally reported as a sign specific for progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). Recent research, however, has provided evidence for the occurrence of the applause sign in various conditions. The aim of this study was to determine the preval...

Background: Scientific research on palliative care in dementia is still underdeveloped. In particular, there are no research studies at all on palliative care issues in young onset dementia (YOD), although significant differences compared to late onset dementia (LOD) are expected. Most studies have focused on persons with dementia in long term car...

Background: The neuropathology of patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) due to a C9orf72 mutation is characterized by two distinct types of characteristic protein depositions containing either TDP-43 or so-called dipeptide repeat proteins that extend beyond frontal and temporal regions. Thalamus and cere...

Objective: To assess the utility of serum neurofilament for diagnosis and monitoring of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) variants. Methods: We investigated neurofilament light chain (NF-L) levels in blood of 99 patients with PPA (40 with nonfluent variant PPA [nfvPPA], 38 with semantic variant PPA [svPPA], 21 with logopenic variant PPA [lvPPA])...

Background: It may be assumed that increased public awareness of dementia due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) together with the availability of efficacious treatment will result in diagnostic evaluation at earlier stages of cognitive decline and diagnosis of dementia due to AD at earlier stages. Methods: All persons that were examined at a universit...

We employed cerebral (18)Fluoro-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography ([(18)F]FDG-PET) to visualize neuronal activation of the frontal motor and premotor cortex during suprathreshold repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) applied to the left primary sensorimotor hand area (SM1(HAND)). Twelve right-handed normal subjects underwent t...

Ten unmedicated patients with Parkinson's disease received sub-threshold 5-Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the primary motor hand area (M1(HAND)) contralaterally to the more affected upper limb. Compared to a midfrontal sham-rTMS, real-rTMS over M1(HAND) was associated with a significant decrease in the global motor UPDR...