Original ArticleA Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Amygdala Responses to Human Faces in Aging and Mild Alzheimer’s Disease
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirty-six right-handed subjects were participants in the study: 12 healthy young adults (M = 24.2, SD = 2.0), 12 healthy elderly adults (M = 71.3, SD = 6.3), and 12 patients with probable mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) (age: M = 71.8 years, SD = 9.6). There were 8 males, 4 females in each group. Healthy young subjects were recruited from the community. Healthy elderly subjects that were cognitively and affectively intact (see Supplemental Data) were recruited via the community or from an
Demographics
Table 1 presents these results. AD subjects performed significantly worse than the healthy elderly (t(22) = −5.89, p < .0001) and young (t(22) = −6.34, p < .0001) on the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), but there was no significant difference in MMSE scores between the young and elderly.
Postscan Ratings
No significant between the groups differences were present for successful recognition of the faces, but there was a trend for poorer performance in the AD group (vs. Elderly: (t(21) = −1.65, p < .11; vs.
Discussion
We demonstrate that mild AD is associated with alterations in amygdala responses to human faces with greater responses to both novel emotional and familiar neutral expressions compared with the healthy elderly. The amygdala results were regionally specific as the effects in the calcarine cortex were not significant. Yet, the calcarine cortex pattern was generally similar, possibly due to milder AD pathology in this region relative to the amygdala (Braak and Braak 1995, Cronin-Golomb et al 1991
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