Kelly Atkins

Monash University (Australia) · Monash Psychology Centre

Older adults who undergo elective surgery may be at risk of an altered cognitive trajectory leading to long‐term decline. We investigated the incidence of cognitive decline in the elderly following elective non‐cardiac surgery five years post‐operatively and examined whether differences in classification criteria for cognitive outcomes resulted in...

Background: Postoperative delirium (POD) is an acute syndrome including inattention and impaired cognition that affects approximately 42% of older cardiac surgical patients. POD is linked to adverse outcomes including morbidity, mortality, and further cognitive decline. Less is known about the subjective psychological experience of POD and its ong...

Objectives An increasing number of people are undergoing lumbar puncture (LP) for the purposes of research. Performing LP for research purposes introduces considerations that differ from LP performed for clinical, diagnostic or therapeutic reasons. The demand for research LP will greatly increase as biomarkers are used to both diagnose and monitor...

Aim: In Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), apathy is a frequently cited barrier to participation in physical activity. Current diagnostic criteria emphasize dissociable variants of apathy that differentially affect goal-directed behavior. How these dimensions present and affect physical activity in HD and PD is unknown. Methods...

Peri-operative neurocognitive disorders are the most common complication experienced by older individuals undergoing anaesthesia and surgery. Peri-operative neurocognitive disorders, particularly postoperative delirium, result in long-term poor outcomes including: death; dementia; loss of independence; and poor cognitive and functional outcomes. Re...

Background In the postoperative period clinically feasible instruments to monitor elderly patients’ neurocognitive recovery and discharge-readiness, especially after short-stay procedures, are limited. Cognitive monitoring may be improved by a novel digital clock drawing test (dCDT). We screened for cognitive impairment with the 4 A Test (4AT) and...

Apathy and fatigue have distinct aetiologies, yet can manifest in phenotypically similar ways. In particular, each can give rise to diminished goal-directed behaviour, which is often cited as a key characteristic of both traits. An important issue therefore is whether currently available approaches are capable of distinguishing between them. Here,...

Background: Perioperative neurocognitive disorders (PND), including postoperative delirium (POD), are common in older adults and, for many, precipitate functional decline and/or dementia. Objective: In this protocol, we describe a novel multidisciplinary, multicomponent perioperative intervention that seeks to prevent or reduce POD and associate...

BACKGROUND: The perioperative inflammatory response may be implicated in adverse outcomes including neurocognitive dysfunction and cancer recurrence after oncological surgery. The immunomodulatory role of anesthetic agents has been demonstrated in vitro; however, its clinical relevance is unclear. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to compare p...

Background Apathy is a disorder of motivation common to Huntington's disease (HD). Recent conceptual frameworks suggest that apathy is not unitary but consists of discrete subtypes (‘dimensions’). Which of the proposed dimensions are preferentially affected in HD, and how these dimensions evolve with disease progression is unknown. Objectives The...

Background We developed a digital clock drawing test (dCDT), an adaptation of the original pen and paper clock test, that may be advantageous over previous dCDTs in the perioperative environment. We trialed our dCDT on a tablet device in the preoperative period to determine the feasibility of administration in this setting. To assess the clinical u...

Motivation is characterized by a willingness to overcome both cognitive and physical effort costs. Impairments in motivation are common in striatal disorders, such as Huntington’s disease (HD), but whether these impairments are isolated to particular domains of behavior is controversial. We ask whether HD differentially affects the willingness of i...

Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and clinically concerning body-image concern (BIC) appear to possess abnormalities in the way they perceive visual information in the form of a bias towards local visual processing. As inversion interrupts normal global processing, forcing individuals to process locally, an upright-inverted stimulus d...

The body image concern (BIC) continuum ranges from a healthy and positive body image, to clinical diagnoses of abnormal body image, like body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). BDD and non-clinical, yet high-BIC participants have demonstrated a local visual processing bias, characterised by reduced inversion effects. To examine whether this bias is a poten...