Robert Krikorian

University of Cincinnati | UC · Department of Psychiatry

Mounting evidence indicates that blueberry consumption is associated with a variety of health benefits. It has been suggested that regular consumption of blueberries can support and/or protect against cardiovascular disease and function, pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes, and brain and cognitive function in individuals with health conditions and age...

Late-life dementia is a growing public health concern lacking effective treatment. Neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) develop over a preclinical period of many years beginning in midlife. The prevalence of insulin resistance, a prominent risk factor for late-life dementia, also accelerates in middle-age. Consumption of ber...

The original Memory Impairment Screen by Telephone (MIST) was designed to identify individuals with dementia but was relatively ineffective for identification of less severe impairment observed in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We expanded the original MIST to create a modified instrument (mMIST) with greater sensitivity to less severe memory imp...

Background: The Comparative Effectiveness Dementia and Alzheimer's Registry (CEDAR) trial demonstrated that individualized, multi-domain interventions improved cognition and reduced the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). As biological sex is a significant risk factor for AD, it is essential to explore the differential effectiveness of targeted clin...

Late-life dementia typically develops over a period of many years beginning in midlife. Prevalence of metabolic disturbance also accelerates in middle age and is a prominent risk factor for dementia. Preliminary studies indicate that blueberry supplementation can improve cognitive performance and influence metabolism and brain function and therefor...

PurposeResearch has demonstrated cognitive benefits following acute polyphenol-rich berry consumption in children and young adults. Berry intake also has been associated with metabolic benefits. No study has yet examined cognitive performance in middle-aged adults. We investigated the relationships among cognitive and metabolic outcomes in middle-a...

We performed a randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trial with blueberry supplementation in older adults with mild cognitive impairment. We measured cognitive performance and parent (unmodified food form) anthocyanins and a suite of flavonoid-based phase 2 metabolites arising from anthocyanins in urine. The blueberry-treated group exhibited...

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common and most costly chronic neurodegenerative disease globally. AD develops over an extended period prior to cognitive symptoms, leaving a "window of opportunity" for targeted risk-reduction interventions. Further, this pre-dementia phase includes early physiological changes in sleep and autonomi...

Introduction: Multidomain intervention for Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk reduction is an emerging therapeutic paradigm. Methods: Patients were prescribed individually tailored interventions (education/pharmacologic/nonpharmacologic) and rated on compliance. Normal cognition/subjective cognitive decline/preclinical AD was classified as Prevention...

Introduction: Glucose hypometabolism and insulin resistance increase risk for and accelerate progression in Parkinson's disease and neurocognitive disorders. We conducted a proof of concept trial to determine whether ketogenesis, a metabolic adaptation induced by dietary carbohydrate restriction, can improve cognitive performance in Parkinson's di...

Awareness of the human health benefits of blueberries is underpinned by a growing body of positive scientific evidence from human observational and clinical research, plus mechanistic research using animal and in vitro models. Blueberries contain a large number of phytochemicals, including abundant anthocyanin pigments. Of their various phytochemic...

The terms “prevention” and “risk reduction” are often used interchangeably in medicine. There is considerable debate, however, over the use of these terms in describing interventions that aim to preserve cognitive health and/or delay disease progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD) for patients seeking clinical care. Furthermore, it is important to...

Introduction The NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery (NIHTB-CB) is a computer-based protocol not yet validated for clinical assessment. Methods We administered the NIHTB-CB and traditional neuropsychological tests to 247 Memory Disorders and Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic patients with subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment, mild dementi...

Like virtually all age-related chronic diseases, late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) develops over an extended preclinical period and is associated with modifiable lifestyle and environmental factors. We hypothesize that multimodal interventions that address many risk factors simultaneously and are individually tailored to patients may help reduce...

BACKGROUND Consumption of polyphenols has been associated with improvements in cognitive function in children (aged 8–10 years old), young adults (18–21 years old) and older adults (65–80 years old). In this study, we investigated the effect of wild blueberry (WBB) consumption on cognitive performance in middle aged adults (45–60 years old) and exa...

There is a substantial body of evidence from animal studies implicating polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) in neuroinflammatory, neurotrophic, and neuroprotective processes in brain. However, direct evidence for a role of PUFA in human brain structure and function has been lacking. Over the last decade there has been a notable increase in neuroimag...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative dementia that affects nearly 50 million people worldwide and is a major source of morbidity, mortality, and healthcare expenditure. While there have been many attempts to develop disease-modifying therapies for late-onset AD, none have so far shown efficacy in humans. However, the long latency between...

Given evidence that eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and anthocyanin-rich blueberries provide neurocognitive benefit, we investigated long-term supplementation in older adults with cognitive complaints. In a 24-week randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, elderly men and women received daily fish oil (FO) or blue...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common form of dementia, which mostly affects elderly people. Gradual loss in memory and declining cognitive functions are core symptoms associated with AD. Conventional brain images do not provide sufficient information to diagnose AD at an early stage. To delay the progression of memory impairment, there is a dire ne...

Objectives: Preclinical studies have shown that blueberry supplementation can improve cognitive performance and neural function in aged animals and have identified associations between anthocyanins and such benefits. Preliminary human trials also suggest cognitive improvement in older adults, although direct evidence of enhancement of brain functi...

Parkinson's disease;sleep

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major source of morbidity and mortality, with the disease burden expected to rise as the population ages. No disease-modifying agent is currently available, but recent research suggests that nutritional and lifestyle modifications can delay or prevent the onset of AD. However, preventive nutritional interventions are n...

The Weill Cornell Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic is investigating the validity of a clinical diagnostic method for early identification of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology. Patients are classified at consensus conferences on the basis of clinical/family history, cognitive/non-cognitive symptoms, examination, and neuropsychological test performance...

The purpose of this study was to determine total water intake and patterns of beverage consumption, and its contribution to total daily micronutrients and calories in older adults with mild memory decline. A descriptive, cross-sectional study was used with 60 independent community-dwelling older adults (71.7 ± 5.4 years) with mild cognitive impairm...

Objectives: To determine the effects of long-chain omega-3 (LCn-3) fatty acids found in fish oil, including eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), on cortical blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activity during a working memory task in older adults with subjective memory impairment. Design: Randomized, double-blind, placebo-...

Background: While diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer's disease (AD) include neuroimaging biomarkers, there remains no definitive biomarker of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). MCI is a risk factor for AD that may be amenable to early intervention. Early decline in white matter (WM) integrity identified by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a predicto...

BACKGROUND: Metabolic disturbance is associated with risk for neurodegeneration, and cerebral glucose hypometabolism is prominent in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Ketone metabolism can compensate for glucose hypometabolism and confers other benefits pertinent to neurodegeneration, among them reduction of oxidative stress and AD pathological factors, su...

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is used to detect tissue pathology. In Alzheimer's disease (AD) research, DTI has been used to elucidate differences in disease stages and to track progression over time and clinical severity. Many of these studies have identified the fornix as particularly vulnerable in the early stages of pathology associated with m...

Polyphenol compounds found in berry fruits, in particular flavonoids, have been associated with health benefits including improvement in cognition and neuronal function with aging. Concord grape juice contains polyphenols, including anthocyanins and flavanols, and previous research has shown improvement in a number of human health conditions with g...

To examine the association of cognitive function to dietary intake and serum insulin and inflammatory markers, we collected data from 38 older adults (72.5±4.9 yrs) with mild cognitive impairment. More than half were females (57.9%), 94.7% were White Americans, and 89.4% had some college or above. Cognitive function was assessed using the Verbal Pa...

We randomly assigned 23 older adults with mild cognitive impairment to either a high carbohydrate or very low carbohydrate diet. Following the 6-week intervention period, we observed improved verbal memory performance for the low carbohydrate subjects (p = 0.01) as well as reductions in weight (p < 0.0001), waist circumference (p < 0.0001), fasting...

Insulin resistance is implicated in the pathophysiological changes associated with Alzheimer's disease, and pharmaceutical treatments that overcome insulin resistance improve memory function in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early Alzheimer's disease. Chromium (Cr) supplementation improves glucose disposal in patients with insuli...

The prevalence of dementia is increasing with expansion of the older adult population. In the absence of effective therapy, preventive approaches are essential to address this public health problem. Blueberries contain polyphenolic compounds, most prominently anthocyanins, which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. In addition, anthocyan...

Concord grape juice contains polyphenol compounds, which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties and influence neuronal signalling. Concord grape juice supplementation has been shown to reduce inflammation, blood pressure and vascular pathology in individuals with CVD, and consumption of such flavonoid-containing foods is associated with...

General health is linked to brain health, and age-related diseases are associated withneurocognitive decline and dementia. Alzheimer's disease (AD) might be conceptualizedas one of the diseases of civilization in the same sense as hypertension and type 2diabetes. Diseases of aging are highly prevalent in developed and developing culturesand, to a l...

The Corsi Block-Tapping task has been utilized as a measure of spatial memory in both clinical and research contexts for several decades. Despite its wide application, the task has been employed with extraordinary variability in administration and scoring and in the composition of stimulus item sets. We have generated a set of test items containing...

We describe five cases of traumatic asphyxiation injury, each meeting diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and characterized by a range of postinjury cognitive impairment. Four patients exhibited dense retrograde amnesia, including absence of conscious memory for the traumatic event. Appreciation of these asphyxiation cases,...

This study investigated the psychometric structure of two widely utilized measures of posttraumatic symptoms in a primarily Caucasian non-clinical sample. Given the prevalence of trauma exposure in non-referred samples, measurement of resulting symptoms is a critical issue. Exploratory factor analysis was utilized to assess and compare the factor s...

While working with individuals with Alzheimer's disease and other dementing disorders presents many challenges for clinicians, none is more difficult than watching an individual who is cognitively impaired mourn the losses of life and those imposed by the dementing illness. There now is a body of literature on grief in caregivers, but little has be...

Bipolar disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric illness that is characterized by episodes of extreme mood states. The affective components of bipolar disorder have been studied extensively, but only recently have investigators begun to systematically examine its cognitive concomitants. Although executive dysfunction has been reported in this populat...

The Corsi Block-Tapping (CB) task has been used as a measure of spatial memory since its development in 1971. However, a standard set of items has been developed for this task, and inconsistencies in performances within levels have been demonstrated in association with different path configuration. This study investigated item consistency by analyz...

The clinical features of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) suggest that a fundamental deficit of inhibitory control is intrinsic to the disorder. In this preliminary study, we sought to examine cognitive disinhibition in OCD by using an established laboratory technique. The stop signal task was administered to a higher functioning, untreated grou...

Dietitians commonly use 24-hour recall to obtain estimates of the typical food intakes for a population. This study was designed to determine whether using an encoding strategy or support at the time of retrieval improves older adults' 24-hour recall of food items and amounts consumed. The study included 17 older adults ranging from 74 to 91 years...

This study examined the effects of age on the types of errors produced when recalling names of faces. The types of errors included confusions (errors within the target set), intrusions (errors outside the target set), errors phonologically similar to the target, errors not phonologically similar to the target, and errors containing the same number...

The authors present a new theory of the neurobiological mechanisms mediating the memory processes involved in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The current fear-conditioning model accounts for learning that underlies certain central features of PTSD, but it fails to account for peritraumatic memory disturbances, episodic memory phenomena that a...

The present study examined whether, for older adults, a verbal or imagery cognitive style is associated with recall of names and faces learned in an experimental condition. Cognitive abilities that are represented in current models of face recognition and name recall were also examined. Those abilities included picture naming, verbal fluency (i.e.,...

This study investigated the effects of type of encoding strategy (organized and disorganized) and of active versus passive encoding on memory for interrelated spatial material. Delayed recall performance for a complex, nonrepresentational two dimensional figure was measured in 120 normal young adults assigned to one of three groups that varied as t...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cincinnati, 1999. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-51). Includes abstract.

The Corsi block-tapping task has enjoyed extensive use in clinical and experimental studies for a quarter of a century and is arguably the single most important nonverbal task in neuropsychological research. Nevertheless, there has been considerable inconsistency not only in the administration and scoring of this measure, but also in the physical p...

The Porteus Maze Test (PMT) has remained an underutilized neuropsychological procedure despite its history as a useful nonverbal measure of executive function ability and of general adaptational capacity. In order to provide contemporary performance standards for this instrument, the Vineland Revision form of the mazes was administered to 340 parti...

This report documents a case of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following psychological trauma with cerebral insult and amnesia for the traumatic event. The case history demonstrates the role of implicit memory in PTSD and indicates that the mechanisms of psychopathology are one-trial sensitization and conditioned emotional responses.

This study investigated the independence of verbal and nonverbal memory processes in a nonclinical young adult sample using parallel procedures designed to elicit verbal and spatial paired associate learning, respectively. The data indicated that, in general, men performed better than women on the spatial learning task, although there was no differ...

Performance data on a newly developed, nonsequential measure of immediate memory capacity (the Configural Attention Test) were collected on groups of elementary schoolchildren aged 7 to 14 and on a young adult sample (mean age = 21.6). The data indicated increasingly proficient performances with advancing age in a generally linear manner. Overall,...

Fifty-seven ambulatory, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients at various stages of disease progression and 17 HIV seronegative controls were examined in a cross-sectional study with self-administered measures of emotional distress, coping, and adjustment to illness. All infected and control subjects were homosexual or bisexual and fr...

The Tower of London procedure (TOL) is being utilized increasingly in clinical and experimental contexts, although there is considerable variation in how it is administered and scored. The procedure detailed here was developed using Shallice's original problems and, along with the Porteus Maze Test (PMT), was administered to 205 elementary school s...

HIV-infected subjects at various stages of illness but without opportunistic cerebral disease were evaluated using a comprehensive, cognitively-based neuropsychological protocol and measures of levels of depression and anxiety. The data indicated a prominent attentional disorder among impaired subjects; however, language, visual-spatial and memory...

The encephalopathy associated with direct nervous system infection by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has been recognized as one of the major debilitating aspects of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and of pre-AIDS conditions. A comprehensive neuropsychological examination of symptomatic HIV-infected subjects without opportunist...

Lateral eye movements (LEM) were measured for 32 right-handed subjects while responding to questions rated for verbal and visual-spatial cognitive content and for varying levels of emotionally stimulating content. The results indicated that eye movements were distributed to the right and left in response to verbal and spatial items, respectively, a...