PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The CORE- AIM study is a pilot project to evaluate the feasibility of cognitive rehabilitation in patients affected by autoimmune encephalitis (AIE). We believe that cognitive rehabilitation could be particularly suitable for those kind of patients, considering that most of them show “functional”, rather than “structural” alterations, likely to have higher margin for improvement. Several case reports actually showed an improvement of neuropsychological performance using cognitive rehabilitation, but there are few systematic data due to the rarity of the condition. We developed and validated an efficient software for cognitive telerehabilitation (HomeCore), that could work efficently for administer cognitive rehabilitation by remote.
One of the mechanisms exploited by cognitive rehabilitation is neuronal plasticity, the ability of the brain tissue to adapt functionally and structurally to negative and positive stimuli modifying the cerebral connectivity. A measure of brain connectivity and its changes could be detected using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques such as the “resting state” functional MRI (fMRI), diffuse tensor imaging MRI (DTI-MRI) and high density-EEG (hd-EEG). Likely we can evaluate the effect of cognitive rehabilitation on connectivity in patients with AIE.