Ricerc@Sapienza

Scents have the ability to affect peoples’ mental states and task performance with to different extents. It has been widely demonstrated that the lemon scent, included in most all-purpose cleaners, elicits stimulation and activation, while the lavender scent elicits relaxation and sedative effects. The present study aimed at investigating and fostering a novel approach to evaluate users’ experience with respect to scents’ effects through the joint employment of Virtual Reality and users’ neurophysiological monitoring, in particular Electroencephalography.

Objective: In this exploratory study, we tested whether electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms may reflect the effects of a chronic administration (4 weeks) of an anti-amyloid β-site amyloid precursor protein (APP) cleaving enzyme 1 inhibitor (BACE-1; ER-901356; Eisai Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan) in TASTPM (double mutation in APP KM670/671NL and PSEN1 M146V) producing Alzheimer's disease (AD) amyloid neuropathology as compared to wild type (WT) mice.

The Electrophysiology Professional Interest Area (EPIA) and Global Brain Consortium endorsed recommendations on candidate EEG measures for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) clinical trials. The Panel reviewed the field literature. As most consistent findings, AD patients with mild cognitive impairment and dementia showed abnormalities in peak frequency, power, and “interrelatedness” at posterior alpha (8-12 Hz) and widespread delta (<4 Hz) and theta (4-8 Hz) rhythms in relation to disease progression and interventions.

Background: It has been shown that theta (6-10 Hz) and delta (1-6 Hz) ongoing
electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms revealed variations in the cortical arousal in C57 Wild Type
(WT) mice during cage exploration (active condition) compared to awake quiet behavior (passive
condition; IMI PharmaCog project, www.pharmacog.eu).
Objective: The objective was to test if these EEG rhythms might be abnormal in old PDAPP mice
modeling Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with a hAPP Indiana V717F mutation (They show abnormal neural

Few minutes of focal vibration (FV) on limb muscles can improve motor control in neurological (stroke, Parkinson) patients for unknown underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. Here we hypothesized that in healthy volunteers this FV would increase excitability in the primary sensorimotor cortex (S1-M1) during an isometric contraction of the stimulated muscle. The design included an initial control condition with no FV stimulation (Baseline) as well as three short experimental sessions of FV and a Sham (fake) session in a pseudo-random order.

Previous evidence showed a 75.5% best accuracy in the classification of 120 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients with dementia and 100 matched normal elderly (Nold) subjects based on cortical source current density and linear lagged connectivity estimated by eLORETA freeware from resting state eyes-closed electroencephalographic (rsEEG) rhythms (Babiloni et al., 2016a). Specifically, that accuracy was reached using the ratio between occipital delta and alpha1 current density for a linear univariate classifier (receiver operating characteristic curves).