Irena Rektorova's research while affiliated with Masaryk University and other places
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Publications (283)
Introduction
According to the strong version of the orthographic depth hypothesis, in languages with transparent letter-sound mappings (shallow orthographies) the reading of both familiar words and unfamiliar nonwords may be accomplished by a sublexical pathway that relies on serial grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. However, in languages such as Engl...
To this date, studies focusing on the prodromal diagnosis of Lewy body diseases (LBDs) based on quantitative analysis of graphomotor and handwriting difficulties are missing. In this work, we enrolled 18 subjects diagnosed with possible or probable mild cognitive impairment with Lewy bodies (MCI-LB), 7 subjects having more than 50% probability of d...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder with a prevalence rate estimated to \(2.0\%\) for people aged over 65 years. Cardinal motor symptoms of PD such as rigidity and bradykinesia affect the muscles involved in the handwriting process resulting in handwriting abnormalities called PD dysgraphia. Nowadays, online handwritten...
Background:
In our previous study, repeated sessions of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the auditory feedback area were shown to improve hypokinetic dysarthria (HD) in Parkinson's disease (PD) and led to changes in functional connectivity within the left-sided articulatory networks.
Objectives:
We analyzed data from this...
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has the potential to modulate cognitive training in healthy aging; however, results from various studies have been inconsistent. We hypothesized that inter-individual differences in baseline brain state may contribute to the varied results. We aimed to explore whether baseline resting-state dynamic fun...
Motor speech disorders in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), collectively referred to as hypokinetic dysarthria, are the early markers of the disease. Acoustic speech features are, therefore, suitable digital biomarkers for the diagnosis and monitoring of this pathological phenomenon. At the same time, it is clear that language plays an essent...
Objective
Alzheimer's disease dementia (AD) and its preclinical stage, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), are critical issues confronting the aging society. Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques have the potential to be effective tools for enhancing cognitive functioning. The main objective of our meta-analysis was to quantify and update t...
White Matter Lesions (WML) are a radiological finding common in aged subjects. We explored the impact of WML on underlying neurodegenerative processes. We focused on the impact of WML on two neurodegenerative diseases with different pathology. In this cross-sectional study of 137 subjects (78 female, 59 men, mean age 67.2; 43–87 years), we compared...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is generally considered a sporadic disorder, but a strong genetic background is often found. The aim of this study was to identify the underlying genetic cause of PD in two affected siblings and to subsequently assess the role of mutations in Cathepsin B (CTSB) in susceptibility to PD. A typical PD family was identified and...
The volume of the hippocampus decreases more slowly than the volume of the cortex during normal aging. We explored changes in the hippocampus-to-cortex volume (HV:CTV) ratio with increasing age in non-demented Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients as compared to healthy controls (HC). We also evaluated the association between the HV:CTV ratio and cogni...
Parkinson's disease dysgraphia (PDYS), one of the earliest signs of Parkinson's disease (PD), has been researched as a promising biomarker of PD and as the target of a noninvasive and inexpensive approach to monitoring the progress of the disease. However, although several approaches to supportive PDYS diagnosis have been proposed (mainly based on...
Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) is a non-invasive technique which is known to produce modifications in cortical brain activity. This paper is devoted to describe potential beneficial effects of rTMS on the phonation stability of Parkinson’s Disease Patients (PDPs). To this end, several measurements derived from phonation have be...
This paper deals with a~complex acoustic analysis of phonation in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with a~special focus on estimation of disease progress that is described by 7 different clinical scales (e.\,g. Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale or Beck depression inventory). The analysis is based on parametrization of 5 Czech vowels pr...
This article presents a~study of the approaches in the state-of-the-art in the field of pathological speech signal analysis with a~special focus on parametrization techniques. It provides a~description of 92 speech features where some of them are already widely used in this field of science and some of them have not been tried yet (they come from d...
Up to 90% of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) suffer from hypokinetic dysathria (HD) which is also manifested in the field of phonation. Clinical signs of HD like monoloudness, monopitch or hoarse voice are usually quantified by conventional clinical interpretable features (jitter, shimmer, harmonic-to-noise ratio, etc.). This paper provides...
This paper deals with a~complex acoustic analysis of phonation in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with a~special focus on estimation of disease progress that is described by 7 different clinical scales (e.\,g. Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale or Beck depression inventory). The analysis is based on parametrization of 5 Czech vowels pr...
Up to 90 % of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) suffer from hypokinetic dysarthria (HD). In this work, we analysed the power of conventional speech features quantifying imprecise articulation, dysprosody, speech dysfluency and speech quality deterioration extracted from a specialized poem recitation task to discriminate dysarthric and healthy...
In this paper, we evaluate the contribution of different handwriting modalities to the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. We analyse on-surface movement, in-air movement and pressure exerted on the tablet surface. Especially in-air movement and pressure-based features have been rarely taken into account in previous studies. We show that pressure and...
This paper deals with a complex acoustic analysis of phonation in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with a special focus on estimation of disease progress that is described by 7 different clinical scales ,e. g. Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale or Beck depression inventory. The analysis is based on parametrization of 5 Czech vowels pron...
Background
There is numerous literature on mechanisms underlying variability of practice advantages. Literature includes both behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Unfortunately, no studies are focusing on practice in constant conditions to the best of our knowledge. Hence it is essential to assess possible differences in mechanisms of neuroplastici...
![Figure 1: Function ψ[l] calculated for healthy and pathological female...](publication/359309996/figure/fig1/AS:1134821552197634@1647573950397/Function-psl-calculated-for-healthy-and-pathological-female-vowels-a-obtained-from-the_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 2: Function ξ[p] calculated for the healthy and pathological...](publication/359309996/figure/fig2/AS:1134821552209921@1647573950408/Function-xp-calculated-for-the-healthy-and-pathological-female-vowels-a-obtained-from_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 3: Comparison of the one-dimensional bicepstral index ρ[n] and...](publication/359309996/figure/fig3/AS:1134821552209922@1647573950417/Comparison-of-the-one-dimensional-bicepstral-index-rn-and-the-real-cepstrum-cn_Q320.jpg)
This paper presents a study of the approaches in the state-of-the-art in the field of pathological speech signal analysis with a special focus on parametrization techniques. It provides a description of 92 speech features where some of them are already widely used in this field of science and some of them have not been tried yet (they come from dif...
The vertex has been used as a suitable control stimulation site in repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation studies. The objectives of this study are (1) to assess cognitive performance (CP) after theta burst stimulation (TBS); (2) to evaluate whether clinically relevant cortical areas might be reached by vertex stimulation and how that might i...
Introduction
Sixteen subjects with biallelic WARS2 variants encoding the tryptophanyl mitochondrial aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, presenting with a neonatal- or infantile-onset mitochondrial disease, have been reported to date. Here we present six novel cases with WARS2-related diseases and expand the spectrum to later onset phenotypes including dopa-...
Introduction
Impaired copy of intersecting pentagons from the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), has been used to assess dementia in Parkinson's disease (PD). We used a digitizing tablet during the pentagon copying test (PCT) as a potential tool for evaluating early cognitive deficits in PD without major cognitive impairment. We also aimed to un...
Background: Dance is a complex activity combining physical exercise with cognitive, social, and artistic stimulation.
Objectives: We aimed to assess the effects of dance intervention (DI) on intra and inter-network resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) and its association to cognitive changes in a group of non-demented elderly participants....
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a powerful tool to probe in vivo brain circuits, as it allows to assess several cortical properties such as excitability, plasticity and connectivity in humans. In the last 20 years, TMS has been applied to patients with dementia, enabling the identification of potential markers of the pathophysiology and...
Dance is a complex sensorimotor activity with positive effects on physical fitness, cognition, and brain plasticity in the aging population. We explored whether individual levels of cognitive reserve (CR) proxied by education moderate dance intervention (DI)-induced plasticity assessed by resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) changes of the...
Research on dance interventions (DIs) in the elderly has shown promising benefits to physical and cognitive outcomes. The effect of DIs on resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) varies, which is possibly due to individual variability. In this study, we assessed the moderation effects of residual cognitive reserve (CR) on DI-induced changes i...
Background:
Electrophysiological markers of prodromal dementia with Lewy bodies were described in the spectral domain. The sub-second temporal resolution may provide additional information.
Objective:
To evaluate electroencephalography (EEG) microstates in patients with mild cognitive impairment with Lewy bodies and to assess the association bet...
Many cognitive functions, including working memory, are processed within large-scale brain networks. We targeted the right frontoparietal network (FPN) with one session of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in an attempt to modulate the cognitive speed of a visual working memory task (WMT) in 27 young healthy subjects using a double-bli...
Clinical diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) occurs typically when a substantial proportion of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra (SN) already died, and the first motor symptoms appear. Therefore, tools enabling the early diagnosis of PD are essential to identify early‐stage PD patients in which neuroprotective treatments could have a s...
Background:
Despite the established value of genomic testing strategies, practice guidelines for their use do not exist in many indications.
Objectives:
We sought to validate a recently introduced scoring algorithm for dystonia, predicting the diagnostic utility of whole-exome sequencing (WES) based on individual phenotypic aspects (age-at-onset...
Enhancing cognitive functions through noninvasive brain stimulation is of enormous public interest, particularly for the aging population in whom processes such as working memory are known to decline. In a randomized double-blind crossover study, we investigated the acute behavioral and neural aftereffects of bifrontal and frontoparietal transcrani...
Introduction
Approximately 10% of patients with Parkinson disease (PD) present with early-onset disease (EOPD), defined as diagnosis before 50 years of age. Genetic factors are known to contribute to EOPD, with most commonly observed mutations in PRKN, PINK1, and DJ1 genes. The aim of our study was to analyze the frequency of PRKN, PINK1, and DJ1 m...
Dance is a complex sensorimotor activity with positive effects on physical fitness, cognition, and brain plasticity in the aging population. We explored whether individual levels of cognitive reserve (CR) proxied by education moderate dance intervention (DI)-induced plasticity assessed by resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) changes of the...
Introduction
Next-generation sequencing is now used on a routine basis for molecular testing but studies on copy-number variant (CNV) detection from next-generation sequencing data are underrepresented. Utilizing an existing whole-exome sequencing (WES) dataset, we sought to investigate the contribution of rare CNVs to the genetic causality of dyst...
Introduction
Hypokinetic dysarthria (HD) is common in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Our objective was to evaluate articulatory networks and their reorganization due to PD pathology in individuals without overt speech impairment using a multimodal MRI protocol and acoustic analysis of speech.
Methods
A total of 34 PD patients with no subjective HD comp...
Deep learning (DL) has provided impressive results in numerous domains in recent years, including medical image analysis. Training DL models requires large data sets to yield good performance. Since medical data can be difficult to acquire, most studies rely on public research cohorts, which often have harmonized scanning protocols and strict exclu...
Clinicopathological overlap between neurodegenerative diseases contributes to challenging differentiation between dementia types. Improving differential diagnosis is important to provide optimal patient care and better predict future needs. Deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural networks have in recent years gained much attention for...
Using multishell diffusion MRI and both tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) and probabilistic tracking of specific tracts of interest, we evaluated the neural underpinnings of the impact of a six-month dance intervention (DI) on physical fitness and cognitive outcomes in nondemented seniors. The final cohort had 76 nondemented seniors, randomized...
Background: Diffusion kurtosis imaging has been applied to evaluate white matter and basal ganglia micro-structure in mixed Parkinson's disease (PD) groups with inconclusive results. Objectives: To evaluate specific patterns of kurtosis changes in PD and to assess the utility of diffusion imaging in differentiating between healthy subjects and cogn...
Deep learning (DL) methods have in recent years yielded impressive results in medical imaging, with the potential to function as clinical aid to radiologists. However, DL models in medical imaging are often trained on public research cohorts with images acquired with a single scanner or with strict protocol harmonization, which is not representativ...
We evaluated the therapeutic effects of non-pharmacological interventions (cognitive training, physical activity, and non-invasive brain stimulation) on cognitive symptoms in Parkinson’s disease. A comprehensive literature search for non-pharmacological intervention randomized controlled trials was performed and effect sizes were calculated for eac...
This study investigates the role of the dorsal/sensorimotor striatum in visuomotor integration (i.e., the transformation of internal visual information about letter shapes into motor output) during handwriting. Twenty healthy participants underwent fMRI scanning with tasks consisting of self-paced handwriting of alphabetically ordered single letter...
A group of European experts reappraised the guidelines on the therapeutic efficacy of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) previously published in 2014 [Lefaucheur et al., Clin Neurophysiol 2014;125:2150-206]. These updated recommendations take into account all rTMS publications, including data prior to 2014, as well as currently rev...
Purpose of Review
We summarize structural (s)MRI findings of gray matter (GM) atrophy related to cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) in light of new analytical approaches and recent longitudinal studies results.
Recent Findings
The hippocampus-to-cortex ratio seems to be the best sMRI biomarker to discrimi...
Dance-movement intervention (DMI) offers multi-component stimulation of cognitive functions, and it may ameliorate cognitive deficits in the elderly. We investigated the effects of intensive DMI on the cognitive performances of healthy seniors (HS) and patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In addition, we evaluated whether the baseline MRI...
Methamphetamine (METH) abuse is known to increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease (PD) due to its dopaminergic neurotoxicity. This is the rationale for the METH model of PD developed by toxic METH dosing (10 mg/kg four times every 2 h) which features robust neurodegeneration and typical motor impairment in mice. In this study, we used diffusion kur...
Deep learning (DL) methods have in recent years yielded impressive results in medical imaging, with the potential to function as clinical aid to radiologists. However, DL models in medical imaging are often trained on public research cohorts with images acquired with a single scanner or with strict protocol harmonization, which is not representativ...
Objectives:
To evaluate effects of a six-month intensive dance exercise intervention (DI) on cognition and brain structure in a mixed group of healthy seniors and people with mild cognitive impairment.
Methods:
Subjects (aged ˃ 60 years with no dementia or depression) were randomly assigned to either a DI group or a LAU (life as usual) group. De...
Gerstmann‐Sträussler‐Scheinker syndrome (GSS) with the P102L mutation is a rare genetic prion disease caused by a pathogenic mutation at codon 102 in the prion protein gene. Cluster analysis encompassing data from seven Czech patients and 87 published cases suggests the existence of four clinical phenotypes (“typical GSS,” “GSS with areflexia and p...
To meet the need for Parkinson's disease biomarkers and evidence for amount and distribution of pathological changes, MRI diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has been explored in a number of previous studies. However, conflicting results warrant further investigations. As tissue microstructure, particularly of the grey matter, is heterogeneous, a more p...
Introduction
Therapeutic strategies targeting protein aggregations are ready for clinical trials in atypical parkinsonian disorders. Therefore, there is an urgent need for neuroimaging biomarkers to help with the early detection of neurodegenerative processes, the early differentiation of the underlying pathology, and the objective assessment of di...
The majority of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients suffer from handwriting abnormalities commonly called as Parkinsonic dysgraphia. Several approaches of PD dysgraphia analysis exist, e.g. based on online handwriting processing. However, a small and unilingual cohort of PD patients is often an issue in quantitative PD dysgraphia analysis studies. Th...
The majority of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients suffer from handwriting abnormalities commonly called as Parkinsonic dysgraphia. Several approaches of PD dysgraphia analysis exist, e.g. based on online handwriting processing. However, a small and unilingual cohort of PD patients is often an issue in quantitative PD dysgraphia analysis studies. Th...
Background
Cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is associated with altered connectivity of the resting state networks (RSNs). Longitudinal studies in well cognitively characterized PD subgroups are missing.
Objectives
To assess changes of the whole-brain connectivity and between-network connectivity (BNC) of large-scale functional netw...
Using MRI, a characteristic pattern of grey matter (GM) atrophy has been described in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD); GM patterns at different stages of Parkinson’s disease (PD) have been inconclusive. Few studies have directly compared structural changes in groups with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) caused by different pathologies (...
