Reduced precuneus deactivation during object naming in Dementia

Posterior midline areas have been associated with the default mode network of the human brain, as they typically exhibit a decrease from high baseline activity during task-related, goal-directed behavior (1). Metabolic alterations of these areas (2, 3) as well as cortical thinning (4) in dementia patients have been demonstrated previously. We used fMRI to test whether task-related activation or de-activation was different in dementia patients compared to healthy elderly controls during an overt picture naming task. The event-related paradigm comprised presentation of single Snodgrass-like pictures which had to b…