{"id":1679,"date":"2013-11-22T14:40:40","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T19:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/?page_id=1679"},"modified":"2014-04-25T11:26:22","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T15:26:22","slug":"cognition-and-religious-coping-in-parkinsons-disease-project","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/cognition-and-religious-coping-in-parkinsons-disease-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Cognition and Religious Coping in Parkinson’s Disease Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our current project, which launched in May 2013, is looking at cognition and religious coping in veterans with Parkinson\u2019s Disease. This project is housed mainly at the Boston VA and is in collaboration with BU and the\u00a0Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our program of research involves the assessment of brain\u00a0functional connectivity patterns, neurochemistry, cognition, religious\u00a0experiences\/practices in 150 patients with Parkinson\u2019s Disease (PD)\u00a0(75 left-onset and 75 right-onset) and 75 age-matched non-neurologic\u00a0controls. Dr. McNamara of Boston University (BU) and the VA New\u00a0England Healthcare System oversee the entire project. Dr. Durso,\u00a0Director of Movement Disorder Service at the VA Boston New England\u00a0Health System, serves as the PD expert. Drs. Harris and Butler serve as consultants. Dr. David Salat of the VA Neuroimaging\u00a0Center oversees fcMRI data collection and analyses. Dr. Wesley\u00a0Wildman, Director of the Science and Religion program at BU, acts as a consultant on the project to ensure that our assessments of\u00a0religion are extensive, nuanced, non-reductionistic, valid and\u00a0reliable. We are testing the following hypotheses:<\/p>\n

H1: Efficient activation of god concepts<\/a><\/strong>
\nPD patients with left-onset disease will exhibit reduced (relative to\u00a0right-onset patients and non-neurologic controls) or abnormally slowed\u00a0or absent priming effects for god concepts but not control concepts.\u00a0This experiment will be an attempted replication of our previous\u00a0results and will identify patients with particular problems accessing\u00a0religious concepts. We also expect that those patients with absent\u00a0priming effects will exhibit different fcMRI connectivity profiles\u00a0from those patients and controls with normal priming effects (see H2\u00a0for more specific fcMRI predictions).<\/p>\n

H2: Neural networks for experiential vs doctrinal religious knowledge<\/a><\/strong>
\nBased on results reported in Kapiogiannis et al (2009) and our own\u00a0work, we hypothesize that PD patients with left-onset disease (and\u00a0relatively greater right-hemispheric impairment) will exhibit reduced\u00a0reaction times for doctrinal concepts and reduced (relative to\u00a0right-onset patients and non-neurologic controls) resting connectivity\u00a0between prefrontal and inferior parietal networks on the right side.\u00a0Conversely, patients with right onset disease will exhibit reduced\u00a0reaction times for experiential religious concepts and reduced\u00a0connectivity between left-sided inferior temporal gyrus, left-sided\u00a0precentral gyrus and posterior occipital lobes.\u00a0We contend that if we find the above or a similar pattern of results;\u00a0i.e., slowed access to doctrinal concepts with reduced connectivity in\u00a0right sided prefrontal-parietal networks but preserved access to\u00a0experiential concepts and no abnormalities in left sided networks AND\u00a0conversely slowed access to experiential knowledge with reduction in\u00a0connectivity between precentral-inferior temporal left-sided networks\u00a0but preserved acccess for doctrinal concepts and no abnormalities in\u00a0right-sided prefrontal \u2013parietal networks, then we will have\u00a0demonstrated a double-dissociation for hemispheric processing of\u00a0doctrinal versus experiential religious concepts. Demonstration of a\u00a0double dissociation of two types of religious cognition with two\u00a0separate neural systems will strongly support the claim that we have\u00a0identified the key neural systems that support these two distinct\u00a0forms of religious cognition.<\/p>\n

H3: Self-report and caregiver reports on religiousness<\/strong>
\nPD patients with left-onset disease (right forebrain impairment) will\u00a0evidence fewer\/less intense religious practices and religious\u00a0experiences (by self-report and caregiver report) relative to their\u00a0right-onset counterparts and to controls. Reduction in religious\u00a0experiences will be associated with poor or absent priming effects\u00a0with god concepts and slowed reaction time (RT) effects on\u00a0experiential vs doctrinal religious knowledge. These individuals will\u00a0also exhibit different functional connectivity profiles from PD\u00a0patients with normal access to religious concepts.<\/p>\n

H4: On-off levodopa study<\/a><\/strong>
\nPriming for god concepts, but not equally complex control concepts,\u00a0will be impaired in PD patients (both right- and left-onset but more\u00a0severe in left-onset patients) when tested \u2018off\u2019 levodopa (LD)\u00a0relative to the \u2018on\u2019 state. This effect will test the idea that\u00a0dopaminergic activity in striatal-prefrontal circuits is required for\u00a0fluent access to religious cognition.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If you are interested in hearing more about our study or have any questions, please contact our head research assistant,\u00a0April Minsky<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our current project, which launched in May 2013, is looking at cognition and religious coping in veterans with Parkinson\u2019s Disease. This project is housed mainly at the Boston VA and is in collaboration with BU and the\u00a0Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion. Our program of research involves the assessment of brain\u00a0functional connectivity patterns, neurochemistry, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1113,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1679"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1113"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1679"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1806,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1679\/revisions\/1806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/len\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}