A research conducted at the University of Granada has identified the different effects of being of a nervous disposition and being anxious at a given moment on what happens around us. Being of a nervous disposition and being anxious at a given moment affects our attention to what happens.

This finding will help improve the treatment of anxiety disorders, so common in our days. In fact, anxiety has become one of the most common conditions among the population, which can explain the negative connotations usually associated to this term.

The study was developed by Antonia Pilar Pacheco-Unguetti, Alberto Acosta, Alicia Callejas and Juan Lupianez, from the department of Experimental Psychology and Behavioural Physiology of the University of Granada. It will be published in the next issue of the prestigious journal Psychological Science.

There are two types of anxiety: trait anxiety, which is a quality of personality that indicates a tendency to feel anxiety and restlessness; and state anxiety, which is an emotional reaction raised in response to a stressful situation or context. Therefore, the later it is of a more immediate and ephemeral nature.

However, the difference between trait and state anxiety has not been identified or established for decades, on the grounds that both types of anxiety make individuals more receptive to negative information, to the detriment of positive or neutral information.

The researchers from the University of Granada have evaluated whether these subtypes of anxiety affect attention differently. To the purpose of this study, an attention test prepared by the researchers was provided to some participants with high and low trait anxiety values, and to other groups of students that had been previously induced to a high state of anxiety or to a positive emotional state.

The results revealed double dissociation in attentional performance. Cognitive control networks of participants with high trait anxiety values showed a deficient attentional performance. Cognitive control networks are responsible for conflict resolution and voluntary action control, functions which are related to the prefrontal cortex. Conversely, the participants with high state anxiety presented an overfunctioning of the alerting and orienting networks, which are attention networks more heavily influenced by the process of analysis of stimuli.

The results obtained provide first evidence that trait and state anxiety affect attention processes differently. Further, from these results, it can be concluded that such influence is present in situations where emotional information processing is not required. This dissociation may help develop specific therapies allowing patients with anxiety disorders to control themselves. The aim is to help patients reinforce efficient mechanisms to focus on the demands of the situation by inhibiting distracting information.

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Researchers of the University of Granada have developed a new computer program that allows early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease through processed images. This new system has enhanced successful early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease up to 90%, which is an important progress within this area of study.

The study was conducted by professor Ignacio Alvarez Illan, a member of SIPBA (Signal Processing and Biomedical Applications) TIC-010 of the University of Granada, and supervised by professors Juan Manuel Gorriz Saez, Javier Ramirez Perez de Inestrosa and Carlos Garcia Puntonet.

Scientists of the University of Granada have validated some new techniques for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease through a series of processed images. These techniques were successfully tested, and promising results were obtained. This study is part of a wider project – still under development – which purpose is developing a complete software for clinical use in hospitals. It is being developed in cooperation with the companies PET-Cartuja and PTEC, and it belongs to the prizewinning project PETRI-DENCLASES, which was rewarded at the III Premios Andalucia Sociedad de la Informacion 2010 edition, a prize awarded by the Andalusian Regional Government to companies contributing to an enhanced information society.

The research group has cooperated with the international project ADNI (Alzheimer’s Disease NeuroImaging Initiative), which confers an international character to the study, and has enabled the use of one of the largest database in the world concerning Alzheimer’s disease.

To test this new automated computer-assisted diagnosis, the researchers of the University of Granada used SPECT and PET tomographies from three different databases. The first database contains 97 de-identified SPECT images which were labelled by experts and provided by Dr Manuel Gomez-Rio and the Department of Nuclear Medicine, university hospital Virgen de las Nieves, Granada, Spain. The second database contains 60 PET images provided by the company PET- Cartuja (Seville). The third was the largest database, and it had 219 PET images provided by ADNI (United States).

These databases included brain CT scans from aged patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or with normal development patterns. A series of algorithms were developed, which allowed the identification of brain areas affected by the disease, and helped in distinguishing diseased patients from healthy ones.

The three methods presented in this study attained 90% success rate in identifying Alzheimer through CT – both PET and SPECT. At present, a computer software is being developed jointly with the company PTEC (Malaga) to translate these results into a software that can be used in hospitals. Thus, neurologists will have a tool as precise as a team of experts.

These results were partially published in the journals Information Sciences (2010), Neuroscience Letters (2009) and Electronics Letters (2009).

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