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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

Investigating the effects of a multimodal arts-based intervention on working memory and brain activation patterns in older adults across the Alzheimer’s disease continuum

Exploring the effects and brain activation pattern of the multimodal art-based intervention on working memory in older adults on alzheimer's disease continuum

The multimodal arts-based intervention improved working memory and global cognitive function, while reduced brain activation following the intervention indicated increased neural efficiency.

This study was conducted as a secondary analysis of a prospective, parallel-arm, randomized waitlist-controlled trial to examine the effectiveness of a multimodal arts-based intervention on working memory (WM) and the underlying brain activation patterns in older adults across the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) continuum. A total of 74 participants were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either the intervention or the waitlist control group; the intervention group participated in a multimodal arts-based program comprising 24 sessions of 90 minutes each over 16 weeks, while the control group received usual care. Neuropsychological assessments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an N-back task were performed before and after the intervention. Following the intervention, the intervention group showed greater improvements in global cognitive function, verbal working memory, and visual working memory than the control group. The fMRI N-back analyses revealed significant activation changes in regions including the frontal gyrus, precuneus, calcarine cortex, cingulate gyrus, Rolandic operculum, insula, and postcentral gyrus; brain activation intensity decreased in participants, and this decrease was negatively correlated with improvements in working memory and global cognitive function. Exploratory analyses found that time, disease stage, age, living arrangements, and beta values for 0-back and 2-back>0-back could predict working memory and global cognitive performance. The authors suggest that the intervention may exert its effects by increasing neural efficiency, with reduced activation following the intervention indicating a shift from compensatory scaffolding to optimized processing. In subgroup analyses, weaker correlations between activation and behavior in the intervention group suggest more complex neural adaptations, whereas stronger correlations in the control group suggest reliance on compensatory mechanisms.

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