Financial Abilities in Neurological Diseases. Development of a Telerehabilitation Program: FINAGE

Financial Abilities (FA) have recently been defined as the capacity to manage money and financial assets in ways that meet a person's needs and which are consistent with her/his values and self-interests. The loss of this capacity can have serious legal, economical, and personal consequences on the individual. The social consequences of maintaining financial abilities are also of pivotal importance. A clear example is given by patients at risk of dementia; the more the population ages, the more the prevalence of dementia increases, and cognitive decline is bound to also affect FA. Moreover, older adults hold a comparatively high share of a nation's wealth. Thus, impairments in FA encountered in this part of the population may also be a risk to the whole society. Only a few studies investigated the neural correlates of FA, focusing mainly on pathological aging. The exact behavioral correlates of decline in this particular domain and the precise relation of unwise financial decisions with the deterioration of anatomical structures are still poorly understood. This may raise the fundamental question of when and why, in relation to neural decline, an individual's FA becomes impaired. The present project addresses both of these problems. The ability to deal with financial matters may differ according to the type of neurological diseases present. Specific anatomical damage, rather than the etiology, may in fact be a better predictor of behavior. Investigating the neural correlates of FA, orthogonally to pathology, is therefore an aim of the present project. Critically, most studies conducted so far analyzed only a few brain regions, which may be restrictive considering the multidimensional nature of FA that presumably draws upon numerous brain networks, cortical hubs, and associated cognitive and emotional processes. A first aim of the present project is to make up for this shortcoming by administering and correlating NADL-F performance with a cognitive assessment and neuroimaging investigation. Studying anatomical correlates of FA, however, is, in the present project, only instrumental in reaching the overarching and final aim of this proposal, which is, building a valid and practical rehabilitation tool. Such a tool shall induce long term positive modifications based on neural plasticity. Understanding the working of such a tool by comparing which brain areas are recruited before and after the rehabilitation program would provide invaluable information. A crucial aspect will be the possibility of administering rehabilitation remotely. Independent measures of the translational value of the treatment will be applied.

Hyphotesis and Significance:

1. FA is impaired in neurological diseases, in different ways according to different pathologies and behavioral correlates.
2. A telerehabilitation program for FA will be able to improve financial autonomy of MCI, Stroke and PD patients along with cognitive functions involved.
3. FA has specific neural correlates, which could be selectively and differently impaired in various neurological pathologies. Moreover, the improvement of FA after the telerehabilitation program would be related to a plastic cerebral reorganization after FA training.

Aims:

1. To investigate FA deficit patterns, by means of NADL-Financial battery, in Parkinson's Disease (PD) and Stroke patients, for which FA deficits were preliminarily observed. These hypotheses are also based on findings on MCI group study, conducted on a numerous sample (N=51). For these reasons, this project aims at extending the preliminary data to Stroke and PD patients' groups. In particular, the study is interested in investigating the specific role played by executive functions and the interaction of FA with numerical functions such as processing and understanding of ratio concepts (%, 3/4, ...), which are important to make advantageous decisions under risk and choose the most optimal financial options.
2. To design and study the efficacy of a telerehabilitation protocol. The protocol will be focused on the improvement of financial abilities and related cognitive domains. The rehabilitation study will include the pathologies investigated in Aim 1 (PD and Stroke) and MCI population.
3. To carry out a neuroimaging study, with the following sub-goals: a) to analyze the neuroanatomical correlates of FA in PD and Stroke patients; b) to explore expected neuroanatomical and neurofunctional changes, due to rehabilitation, in PD, Stroke and MCI patients.