19/01/2023
Dr. Branislava Ćurčić-Blake is looking for a PhD together with Faculty of Arts, Rug and Macquarie University (Australia).
Info about application can be found on these pages https://phd-idealab.com/application/ and about the specific position here https://phd-idealab.com/application/projects/
Language decline in subjective cognitive impairment: Early detection of dementia
Supervisory team:
Dr. Branislava Ćurčić-Blake (University of Groningen; b.curcic@umcg.nl)
Prof. Roel Jonkers (University of Groningen, r.jonkers@rug.nl)
Assistant Prof. Srđan Popov (University of Groningen, s.popov@rug.nl)
Prof. Greg Savage (Macquarie University, greg.savage@mq.edu.au)
Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is a form of cognitive impairment and one of the early predictors of Alzheimer’s disease, preceding objective mild cognitive impairment (MCI). SCD is a self-reported decline in cognition and memory without measurable objective cognitive impairment. In recent years SCD has been put in focus because it is important for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. While it is often possible to detect early AD using biomarkers, in order to avoid invasive and cumbersome tests (lumbar puncture and PET) it is important to find different, less invasive methods for early detection.
Language deficits have been reported for AD and aMCI. They include an impaired lexical access and restricted vocabulary range, reduced idea density, impaired semantic fluency and sentence level complexity, reduced discourse cohesion, “empty speech,” and paraphasias. Our project aims to investigate language deficits in people with SCD with a focus on deficits at the sentence level. We will integrate clinical linguistic findings with brain activation measured by fNIRS and eye-movement patterns measured by eye-tracking. This is a longitudinal study with a follow-up of 1 or 2 years. In this way, we plan to create a neurolinguistic profile of SCD using neuropsychological and neuroimaging data.
Projects Candidates are highly recommended to write a proposal that fits into one of the following research lines and are recommended to contact the relevant supervisors when developing proposals. Other projects may be developed but the potential supervisors at the partner universities MUST be conta...
