Neuroplasticity of Cortical Areas Induced by Cognitive Training in Patients With Multiple Sclerosis MS-NEUROPLAST

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Description

"Cognitive decline is a debilitating and widespread comorbidity of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) affecting up to 65 percent of patients with MS (PwMS). Cognitive changes can be the only behavioral index of MS activity. But how accurately and timely can these be captured? The existing clinical tools are su...

"Cognitive decline is a debilitating and widespread comorbidity of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) affecting up to 65 percent of patients with MS (PwMS). Cognitive changes can be the only behavioral index of MS activity. But how accurately and timely can these be captured? The existing clinical tools are subjective and do not have the dynamic of prognosis. It remains uncertain how much change in cognitive status is required to translate into a meaningful clinical outcome and how long it may subsequently take to become apparent. Moving towards a holistic approach, MS-NEUROPLAST aims to further expand previously-published prognostic marker candidates and previous work of the applicant and the members of the research team and employ a group of methodologies for interventions and applications which will quantify via real-world assessment the MS-related cognitive changes in order to characterize not only decline but given the right dosage of stimulation improvement as well. MS-NEUROPLAST has three main objectives: (i) Utilize state of-the-art neuroimaging and network science measures to more thoroughly understand neural indices of cognitive impairment in PwMS. (ii) Evaluate the efficacy for treating MS-associated cognitive deficits using a computerized cognitive training treatment by determining the differences, between subjects treated with cognitive training and controls, on network science measures indexing network efficiency or collapse and on the performance of a battery of neuropsychological tests that are frequently impaired in MS. (iii) Investigate the dissociation of the cortical mechanisms related to training-induced plasticity and maladaptive reorganization (namely separate good from bad), by taking into account the homeostatic capacity of the human organism as a whole and thus examining whether the correlation of the neurophysiological and cognitive indices with longitudinal digital biomarkers of daily functional status can capture the underlying pathology. "

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