Catherine Pennington

• MBChBMD MRCP BSc (Neuroscience)
• Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at University of Edinburgh

Background Current proposed criteria for functional cognitive disorder (FCD) have not been externally validated. We sought to analyse the current perspectives of cognitive specialists in the diagnosis and management of FCD in comparison with neurodegenerative conditions. Methods International experts in cognitive disorders were invited to assess s...

The Scottish Cognitive Clinics Scoping Exercise was conducted from January to September of 2021. The scoping exercise aimed to collate information on the current landscape for clinical assessment of cognitive complaints and neurodegenerative disease in Scotland. The scoping exercise consisted of an examination of public information ('secondary data...

Functional Cognitive Disorder (FCD) is a common diagnosis at the memory clinic. FCD is characterised by significant self-reported cognitive symptoms in the absence of external evidence of cognitive dysfunction. A potential explanation for this is a deficit in metacognition, the process by which we internally judge our own abilities. Here we investi...

Functional cognitive disorder (FCD) is a relatively common cause of cognitive symptoms, characterised by inconsistency between symptoms and observed or self-reported cognitive functioning. We aimed to improve the clinical characterisation of FCD, in particular its differentiation from early neurodegeneration. Two patient cohorts were recruited from...

In order to address the oft-cited societal, economic, and health and social care impacts of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, we must move decisively from reactive to proactive clinical practice and to embed evidence-based brain health education throughout society. Most disease processes can be at least partially prevented, s...

Objectives Altered awareness of cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms is a common feature of neurodegeneration, which can significantly impact on quality of life, medication concordance and personal safety. Elucidating how awareness is affected by common alpha‐synucleinopathies therefore has significant clinical relevance. We performed a systemat...

An increasing proportion of cognitive difficulties are recognized to have a functional cause, the chief clinical indicator of which is internal inconsistency. When these symptoms are impairing or distressing, and not better explained by other disorders, this can be conceptualized as a cognitive variant of functional neurological disorder, termed fu...

Behavioural studies investigating the preservation of semantic memory in healthy ageing have reported mixed findings. One suggested reason for this discrepancy is that the processes underpinning lexical access to semantic knowledge may be sensitive to ageing. It is therefore necessary to assess semantic memory utilising tasks that are not explicitl...

Objectives/Aims Functional Cognitive Disorder (FCD) describes distressing or disabling cognitive symptoms that can be positively identified as internally inconsistent with recognised brain or systemic disease processes. FCD is common amongst attendees to cognitive or memory clinics. We aimed to improve the clinical characterisation of such patients...

Objectives Altered awareness of motor symptoms is reported in people with Parkinson's disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies, and may adversely affect quality of life and medication concordance. How symptom awareness is influenced by motor and cognitive disease severity, age and medication use is not fully understood. We carried out a systematic rev...

Aim: Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a significant cause of dementia in mid-life and older adults. The extent of interactions between FTLD and other neurodegenerative pathologies is unclear. We reviewed the occurrences of mixed pathology in cases of neuropathologically diagnosed FTLD from the UK Brain Bank Network. Materials and methods...

Altered insight into disease or specific symptoms is a prominent clinical feature of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Understanding the neural bases of insight is crucial to help improve FTD diagnosis, classification and management. A systematic review to explore the neural correlates of altered insight in FTD and associated syndromes was conducted....

Functional cognitive disorder describes patients with persistent, troublesome subjective cognitive complaints that are inconsistent with a recognized disease process, and where significant discrepancies are found between subjective and objectively observed cognitive functioning. The etiology is heterogeneous and potentially related to underlying ps...

Purpose: Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a neurodegenerative disorder associated with a poor prognosis and a substantial reduction in quality of life. The rate of misdiagnosis of FTD is very high, with patients often waiting for years without a firm diagnosis. This study investigates the current state of the misdiagnosis of FTD using a novel artif...

Introduction Widespread white matter damage and cognitive impairment have been demonstrated in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, it remains unclear if brain atrophy is a global phenomenon or if specific subregions are differentially affected. The aims of this study are, first, to test a simple, validated visual analogue grading...

Background: dementia is a common cause of altered decision-making capacity. Determining whether an individual has the ability to make a specific decision can be very challenging for both clinicians and researchers. The UK legislation requires that we both promote residual capacity where possible, and protect vulnerable adults who cannot make indep...

A study of the AI-powered algorithm in improving the diagnostic accuracy of the FrontoTemporal Dementia

Both recognition of familiar objects and pattern separation, a process that orthogonalises overlapping events, are critical for effective memory. Evidence is emerging that human pattern separation requires dentate gyrus. Dentate gyrus is intimately connected to CA3 where, in animals, an autoassociative network enables recall of complete memories to...

Background Widespread white matter damage and cognitive impairment have been demonstrated in COPD. However, it remains unclear if regional atrophy is present. We used a simple clinical visual rating scale to measure regional atrophy in a well-characterised population with COPD and compared age-matched controls. We explored correlations with demogra...

Patients frequently present to the memory clinic with self-reported cognitive symptoms that cannot be attributed to structural, toxic, or metabolic causes, and are out of keeping with their performance on neuropsychological assessment. This can be considered to be Functional (psychosomatic) Cognitive Disorder, which results in significant patient d...

To err is human, and it is normal to make minor cognitive errors from time to time. Some people experience persistent subjective cognitive difficulties that cause distress and functional impairment, with no underlying structural, neurodegenerative, toxic or metabolic cause. This is considered a form of functional disorder. In this article, we revie...

Paraneoplastic syndromes (PNS) are remote manifestations of malignancy unrelated to tumour invasion or metastases. They pose a diagnostic challenge because of diverse presentations. (18)F-Fluorodeoxyglucose ((18)F-FDG) PET-CT is an emerging technique for the detection of malignancy; however, there is a paucity of data with regard to its role in the...

Encephalitis associated with antibodies to the N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (NMDA-R) was first described in young women with ovarian teratoma. It has subsequently been described in men, children and in those without an underlying tumour. Characteristic clinical features include neuropsychiatric symptoms, seizures, movement disorders, hypoventilati...

Genetic factors are implicated in the aetiology of sporadic late-onset neurodegenerative diseases. Whether these genetic variants are predominantly common or rare, and how multiple genetic factors interact with each other to cause disease is poorly understood. Inherited prion diseases are highly heterogeneous and may be clinically mistaken for spor...

Impaired episodic memory is currently an exclusion criterion for behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD), although prior studies have shown that neuropsychological memory performance varies from very impaired to intact in such patients. Our study investigated i) whether this variability might be due to the admixture of true bv-FTD and p...

Impaired episodic memory is currently an exclusion criterion for behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD), although prior studies have shown that neuropsychological memory performance varies from very impaired to intact in such patients. Our study investigated i) whether this variability might be due to the admixture of true bv-FTD and p...

A 30-year-old man died of a progressive neuropsychiatric illness of approximately 17 months' duration with a clinical picture strongly suggestive of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD).1 His initial symptoms, at the age of 28, were of personality change with anxiety and irritability. Lower abdominal and leg pain were troublesome early symptoms...

It is 10 years since the detection of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) 14-3-3 was included in the diagnostic criteria for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) by the WHO. Since that time, other CSF proteins, such as S100b and tau protein, have been proposed as surrogate markers for sCJD. The authors aimed to investigate the diagnostic value of each o...

Genetic analysis of the human prion protein gene (PRNP) in suspect cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is necessary for accurate diagnosis and case classification. Previous publications on the genetic variation at the PRNP locus have highlighted the presence of numerous polymorphisms, in addition to the well recognised one at codon 129, with s...

The utility of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteins such as 14-3-3, tau protein and S-100b as diagnostic markers in the early stages of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) is unclear. We examined the diagnostic value of these CSF proteins in the early stages of sCJD (within 6 weeks of onset of symptoms). Four groups of patients were compared: p...

The initial aims were to use recently available observations of glioblastomas (as part of a previous study) that had been imaged twice without intervening treatment before receiving radiotherapy in order to obtain quantitative measures of glioma growth and invasion according to a new bio-mathematical model. The results were so interesting as to rai...

Delays between surgery and the delivery of radiotherapy may allow brain tumours to grow beyond the planned radiotherapy fields and therefore reduce the effectiveness of radiotherapy. This pilot study aimed to ascertain whether significant growth of brain tumours occurs between post-biopsy imaging and the start of radiotherapy. Two estimates of tumo...