Nicolas Carvalho

Lausanne University Hospital | CHUV · Institut universitaire de médecine sociale et préventive

The primary aim of this study was to characterize oculomotor performances in elderly depressed patients. The second aim was to investigate whether cognitive inhibition measured by the antisaccade task was associated with a psychomotor retardation or rather with a more specific cognitive-motor inhibition deficit. Twenty patients with a major depress...

Objectives: Although several reported studies have suggested that younger adults with depression display depression-related biases during the processing of emotional faces, there remains a lack of data concerning these biases in older adults. The aim of our study was to assess scanning behavior during the processing of emotional faces in depressed...

Background Depression in people aged 65 and more appears to be a major public health problem. Efficient mechanisms of inhibition are important to communicate with other people and to interact with the environment but seem to be deficient in young depressed patients. This function needs to be evaluated in late life depression which has specific feat...

Motor imagery is a potential tool to investigate action representation, as it can provide insights into the processes of action planning and preparation. Recent studies suggest that depressed patients present specific impairment in mental rotation. The present study was designed to investigate the influence of unipolar depression on motor imagery a...

Background: The analysis of eye movements (EM) by eye-tracking has been carried out for several decades to investigate mood regulation, emotional information processing, and psychomotor disturbances in depressive disorders. Method: A systematic review of all English language PubMed articles using the terms “saccadic eye movements” OR “eye-tracking”...

Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) might be a promising treatment strategy for depression. As disturbances in psychomotor activity are one of the key features of unipolar depression are, we aimed to evaluate the behavioral effects of ten tDCS sessions over a 5-day p...

Facial movements of others during verbal and social interaction are often too rapid to be faced and/or processed in time by numerous children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which could contribute to their face-to-face interaction peculiarities. We wish here to measure the effect of reducing the speed of one's facial dynamics on the...

Background: In view of population aging, a better knowledge of factors influencing the type of long-term care (LTC) among older adults is necessary. Previous studies reported a close relationship between incontinence and institutionalization, but little is known on opinions of older citizens regarding the most appropriate place of care. This study...

Background Numerous studies have attempted to identify predictors of institutionalization in the general population. Gender studies have led to inconsistent results. Some authors argued that older women were more likely than older men to use long-term care services, while others failed to highlight a specific gender effect on the use of long-term c...

Objectives Major depressive disorder has been associated with impairments in social cognition. However, studies exploring the processing of social information focused on facial discrimination. The aim of this study was to better characterize the sensorimotor mechanisms underlying motor resonance in depressed patients. Method Twenty-three right-hand...

Numerous researches have attempted to identify predictors of institutionalization in the general population. Gender studies have led to inconsistent results, some authors arguing that women were more likely to use long-term care (LTC) services than older men were, while others failed to highlight a specific gender effect on the prediction of usage...

Objective. Several studies have demonstrated saccadic eye movement (SEM) abnormalities in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) when patients performed prosaccade (PS) and antisaccade (AS) tasks. Some studies have also showed that SEM abnormalities were correlated with dementia rating tests such as the MMSE. Therefore, it has been suggested that SEMs could prov...

While there is a long history and tradition of behavioral research on basic motor skills in Down syndrome (DS), there has been only limited research on handwriting ability. We analyzed the spatiotemporal features of handwriting produced by children and adults with DS (n = 24), and compared their productions with those of comparison groups matched f...

Les mouvements oculaires font partie de ces activités motrices réalisées quotidiennement et, généralement, sans en avoir conscience. Ils peuvent cependant être le reflet du fonctionnement cognitif et émotionnel, les rendant ainsi particulièrement intéressants pour l’étude des pathologies psychiatriques comme la dépression. Débutée il y a plusieurs...

The aims of this study were to describe the spectrum of recessively inherited POLG-related disorders, to report new POLG mutations and to discuss genotype-phenotype correlations in order to propose a strategy for diagnosis. Twenty eight patients diagnosed with two POLG mutations at 12 tertiary European centers of adult neurology were studied. Exhau...

The specificities of dépression in thé elderly, on both thé cognition and emotional level, may render its diagnosis difficult. Dépression in young patients is characterized by thé présence of bias directed toward négative information. No study has assessed thé attentional bias in thé elderly depressed although aging changes thé emotional informatio...