Publications

The Brain Behaviour Group (BBG) Publications

Publications are the main way that researchers communicate their findings to other members of the scientific community. This page provides a list of scientific publications from the Brain Behaviour Group in reverse chronological order. To make our research more accessible, we have included lay summaries of papers intended for a general audience. This is still a work in progress. Summaries of papers from 2024 were written by PhD Student, Lucy Core, and edited by other members of the BBG. Summaries of papers from 2025 onwards will be written by the first author of the paper.

van't Hooft et al. 2025. Pathological fondness for noises with right temporal lobe atrophy. Pract Neurol. 8:pn-2025-004714.

Levett et al. 2025. Hearing impairment and dementia: cause, catalyst or consequence. J Neurol. 272(6): 402. 

Jiang et al. 2024. Comprehension of acoustically degraded emotional prosody in Alzheimer's disease and primary progressive aphasia. Scientific Reports. 14: 31332. 

The words that people say are not the only things that provide information about what they are saying. A person’s tone of voice conveys emotion which provides additional meaning. For example, the phrase “That’s great” could mean very different things depending on if it’s said excitedly or sarcastically. Additionally, the speech that we hear in everyday life is usually distorted, often because of background noise. This study looked at how people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA) comprehend emotions in clear and distorted speech. The results showed that:

  • All patient groups had difficulty identifying emotions in clear speech compared to healthy volunteers
  • Patients had an even harder time identifying emotions when the speech was distorted
  • Identifying emotions in distorted speech was related to empathy and perspective-taking, two measures of social cognition (how people think about and interact with other people)

These results tell us about how attuned patients with AD and PPA are to the emotional aspects of speech, something that has previously been overlooked. Additionally, asking people to identify emotions in distorted speech may be a good way for doctors to quickly assess real-world communication problems and social cognition in the clinic.

 

Mazzeo et al. 2024. Primary progressive aphasia in Italian and English: A cross-linguistic cohort study. Neurology. 103: e210058. 

There are many differences across the world’s languages. Therefore, the symptoms of primary progressive (PPA) might be different in different languages. This research study compared symptoms in patients with the semantic (svPPA), logopenic (lvPPA), nonfluent (lvPPA), and non-specific (PPA-NOS) variants who spoke English vs. Italian. The results showed that:

  • There was a higher percentage of Italian PPA patients who had difficulties with producing grammatically correct speech
  • There were more English PPA patients who had trouble understanding single words.
  • There was also a higher prevalence of patients with (PPA-NOS) in the Italian cohort.

These findings highlight the need for PPA research that spans multiple languages since language differences may affect diagnosis and symptom management.   

 

Jiang et al. 2024. Preserved musical working memory and absolute pitch in posterior cortical atrophy. Cortex. 181:1-11. 

This paper is a case study which focused on a single person with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), which is a type of Alzheimer’s disease characterised by vision problems. This person was a highly trained musician with absolute pitch, which is the uncommon ability to name a musical note without the help of a reference note. The researchers found that:

  • This person retained their absolute pitch abilities after the onset of their PCA symptoms.
  • When asked to listen to sequences of musical notes and then sing exactly what they heard (a measure of musical working memory), they performed just as well as other older musicians without dementia.
  • However, when asked to listen to strings of numbers and repeat them (a measure of verbal working memory), they struggled.

These results indicate that different types of working memory (e.g., musical vs. verbal) might be supported by different brain processes. In addition, the results show that absolute pitch and musical working memory can be spared in people with PCA.

 

Warren 2024. Neurological eponyms? Take your Pick. Pract Neurol. 17:535-544. 

This is an opinion paper about whether using the name of a person who discovered a particular medical condition (eponym) is useful clinically for describing that condition. Professor Warren provides a long (but not exhaustive) list of eponyms in the field of neurology – some common examples include Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Huntington’s disease. He suggests that eponyms are only useful if they are relevant to current clinical practice and refer to a discrete set of features that would be otherwise difficult to describe. The title of the paper is a play on words, as frontotemporal dementia used to be referred to as Pick’s disease because it was discovered by Arnold Pick.

Volkmer et al. 2024. An international core outcome set for primary progressive aphasia (COS-PPA): Consensus-based recommendations for communication interventions across research and clinical settings. Alzheimers Dement. 

This is the first research study to establish a core outcome set (COS) for interventions for people living with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). COS refers to the set of outcome measures that will be used to assess whether an intervention has been successful. Five measures were identified:

  • 1 - participate in conversations
  • 2 - get words out
  • 3 - be more fluent
  • 4 - convey a message by any means
  • 5 - understand what others are saying

These measures may need to be revised as more research into PPA is completed but has started the conversation on measuring outcomes for people with PPA and their care partners. A next step for the research community is to determine how to measure these outcomes. Please note that the plans for this study are described in the other paper by Volkmer et al. (2024) listed below. 

 

Jiang et al. 2024. Pure-tone audiometry and dichotic listening in primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer's disease. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove).

Our ears help us receive and detect sounds (peripheral / ‘ear’ hearing), but our brains are responsible for interpreting and deriving meaning from sounds (central / ‘brain’ hearing). This study looked at peripheral and central hearing in people living with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA).

  • To assess peripheral hearing, participants listened to simple tones that varied in loudness and pitch and pressed a button if they could hear the tone (pure-tone audiometry).
  • To assess central hearing, participants heard different numbers in each ear at the same time (e.g., “1” in the left ear and “7” in the right ear) and had to report which numbers they heard (dichotic listening task).
  • All patient groups performed equally well to the healthy volunteers on the peripheral hearing task, but worse on the central hearing task.

These results highlight that central hearing is an important feature of dementia, and central hearing problems might serve as an early indicator of dementia.

 

Taylor et al. 2024. Data-driven neuroanatomical subtypes of primary progressive aphasia. Brain. 

Brain scans are often used to help diagnose people living with dementia. However, there is large variability in what the brain looks like across the primary progressive aphasia (PPA) subtypes. This research study used a machine learning algorithm to investigate differences in brain structure in PPA. Patients with the semantic (svPPA), logopenic (lvPPA), nonfluent (lvPPA), and non-specific (PPA-NOS) variants completed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans. The scans for all participants were given to the algorithm without the algorithm knowing what each patient’s diagnosis was.

  • The algorithm grouped the brain scans into four distinct ‘brain subtypes’ solely based on the features of the scans themselves.
  • There was a clear association between svPPA and one brain subtype. lvPPA and nfvPPA were related to the other three brain subtypes.
  • There was no clear relationship between PPA-NOS and any of the four brain subtypes.

This research helps contribute to our understanding of brain structure in PPA participants, which is critical for diagnosis, tracking how the condition evolves over time, and developing drug treatments.

 

Chokesuwattanaskul et al. 2024. Inappropriate trusting behaviour in dementia. Front Neurol. 

Impaired decision making and judgement might lead people living with dementia to trust others they should not. This could have social or financial consequences, for example, getting scammed. This study looked at inappropriate trusting behavior. The researchers found that:

  • Inappropriate trusting behavior was most common in patients living with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; 55% of patients showed it) and semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA; 44%) compared to patients living with Alzheimer’s disease (AD; 24%) or nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA; 17%).
  • Out of the patients who exhibited inappropriate trusting behaviour, the svPPA patients tended to be more apathetic and bvFTD patients tended to be more impulsive and be less sensitive to adverse events (in this case, pain).

These results highlight that the prevalence of trusting behaviours differs across dementia subtypes and that clinicians should discuss this with all people living with dementia, especially those with bvFTD and svPPA. 

 

Hardy CJD, et al. 2024. Symptom-based staging for logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia. Eur J Neurol. 31:e16304. 

This paper focused on people with logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA). It is not well-established how symptoms in people with lvPPA evolve over time. A clinical staging system would be useful for clinicians and lvPPA patients and their families to help guide symptom management and care planning. Therefore, the researchers sought to develop one. They gave surveys to care partners of people with lvPPA that asked about a wide range of symptoms.

  • The results suggested that there are six clinical stages of lvPPA.
  • Symptoms in earlier stages involve word-finding difficulties, problems with understanding speech in noisy settings, and problems with memory and navigation.
  • Symptoms in later stages include having trouble understanding simple messages and having issues producing speech that other people can understand.

 

Volkmer A et al. 2024. COS-PPA: protocol to develop a core outcome set for primary progressive aphasia. BMJ Open. 14:e078714. 

When developing an intervention, it is necessary to have a set of measurable outcomes that indicate whether the intervention was successful, called a core outcome set (COS). This paper laid out the plans for a three-stage study that will help identify a COS for primary progressive aphasia (PPA) interventions. The reason for doing this study is because there is no published COS specifically for PPA (at the time of publication). The three stages of this study are as follows:

  • Stage 1 - look at past research to see what measures have been used
  • Stage 2 - consult people living with PPA and their care partners to identify what outcome measures are most important to them
  • Stage 3 - gather PPA experts across the globe to agree upon the COS.

 

Mazzeo et al. 2024. Dysphagia in primary progressive aphasia: Clinical predictors and neuroanatomical basis. Eur J Neurol. 31:e16370

This research study looked at swallowing problems (dysphagia) in people living with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The researchers discovered that:

  • Swallowing problems were the most common in people living with the nonfluent variant (nfvPPA), with 43% of patients having issues.
  • In comparison, only 5% of people with the semantic variant (svPPA) had swallowing issues and no patients with the logopenic variant (lvPPA) had issues.
  • There were certain brain regions that were smaller in nfvPPA patients with dysphagia than those without.
  • nfvPPA patients who had difficulties with voluntarily moving their face tended to have swallowing problems too.

The results highlight that dysphagia is an important non-language aspect of nfvPPA that clinicians need to be aware of so that patients can receive the appropriate care.

 

van’t Hooft J, et al. 2024. Musical experience influences socio-emotional functioning in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia. Front. Neurol. 15. 

This research study focused on people living with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). It looked at how someone’s musical background might be related to their social behaviours and ability to process emotions. The results showed that

  • People who learned to play a musical instrument or sing when they were younger tended to have fewer social behaviour problems and tended to be better at perspective taking.
  • People who spent more time listening to music tended to have greater empathy.

These results suggest that music might affect the severity of behavioural symptoms seen in bvFTD.

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Our research group primarily works with people living with Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, and primary progressive aphasia. A basic understanding of the different dementia subtypes is helpful for understanding these lay summaries. Please see a brief overview below:

 

lay summaries diagram

 

We refer you to here for more information about the different types of dementia. 

Please note that this research is not meant to provide medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider with any specific queries.

Thank you for your interest in our research!