BACKGROUND Apathy is a pervasive noncognitive neuropsychiatric disturbance in Alzheimer disease, which causes significant caregiver distress. The neuroanatomical substrate of apathy is not well understood. OBJECTIVE To study the relationship between regional cerebral blood flow and the presence and severity of the personality disturbance, apathy, in individuals with Alzheimer disease. DESIG...

BACKGROUND Apathy is usually defined as reduced interest and participation in various activities. It is a frequent consequence of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Although various scoring methods have been proposed, there is a lack of validated, standardised instruments for detecting apathy and assessing its severity. OBJECTIVE To develop an apathy rating scale using a structured stand...

OBJECTIVES To describe the prevalence and clinical determinants of apathy in elderly nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and their relationship to quality of life (QoL). METHODS A total of 106 nondemented elderly patients with PD were examined using the Movement Disorder Society-Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), Starkstein Apathy Scale, Hospital Anxiety and ...

BACKGROUND Apathy is an enduring and debilitating feature related to poor outcome in patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP). The biological underpinnings of apathy are unknown. We tested if FEP patients with persistent apathy (PA) differed from FEP patients without persistent apathy (NPA) in specific brain structure measures in the early phase of illness. METHODS A total of 70 Norwegian ...

Negative symptoms are a core feature of schizophrenia and have been grouped into 2 factors: a motivational factor, which we refer to as apathy, and a diminished expression factor. Recent studies have shown that apathy is closely linked to functional outcome. However, knowledge about its mechanisms and its relation to decision-making is limited. In the current study, we examined whether apathy i...

Negative symptoms in schizophrenia have been grouped into the 2 factors of apathy and diminished expression, which might be caused by separable pathophysiological mechanisms. Recently, it has been proposed that apathy could be due to dysfunctional integration of reward and effort during decision making. We asked whether apathy in particular is associated with stronger devaluation ("discounting"...

This paper implements a unified model of individual abstention and vote choice to analyze policy-based alienation and indifference in Brazil’s 2002 presidential election. The results indicate that both alienation and indifference depressed turnout, with indifference contributing slightly more to voter abstention. Also, the determinants of alienation and indifference differed considerably, the f...

BACKGROUND Apathy is a common neuropsychiatric symptom in Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Detecting apathy accurately may facilitate earlier diagnosis of AD. The Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES) is a promising tool for measurement of apathy in prodromal and possibly preclinical AD. OBJECTIVE To compare the three AES sub-scales - subject-reported (AES-S), in...

OBJECTIVES To determine the prognostic value of apathy for mortality in patients of somatic (SC) and dementia special care (DSC) nursing home (NH) units. DESIGN Longitudinal design, secondary analyses of a 2-year, cluster-randomized trial with six measurements, approximately 4 months in between. SETTING SC and DSC-units of Dutch NHs. PARTICIPANTS NH-patients of seventeen SC-units (n = 342...

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple’s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behavior that permits identificati...