The role of limbic structures in financial abilities of mild cognitive impairment patients

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients experience problems in financial abilities that affect everyday functioning. To date, the neural correlates of decline in this domain are unclear. This study aims at examining the correlation between the pattern of brain atrophy of MCI patients and performance on financial abilities. Forty-four MCI patients and thirty-seven healthy controls underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging, and assessment of financial abilitiesby means of the Numerical Activities of Daily Living Financial battery (NADL-F). As compared to healthy controls, MCI patients showed impaired performance in three out of the seven domains assessed by NADL-F: Item purchase, percentage, and financial concepts. The patients’ performance in the NADL-F correlated with memory, language, visuo-spatial, and abstract reasoning composite scores. The analysis also revealed that volumetric differences in the limbic structures significantly correlated with financial abilities in MCI. Specifically, the patients’ performance in the NADL-F was correlated with atrophy in the left medial and lateral amygdala and the right anterior thalamic radiation. These findings suggest that completing daily financial tasks involves sub-cortical regions in MCI and presumably also the motivational and emotional processes associated to them. Involvement of altered limbic structures in MCI patients suggests that impairment in financial abilities may be related to emotional and reflexive processing deficits.