In a group of 166 patients who had received electroconvulsive therapy more than one year previously the prevalence of epilepsy did not differ significantly from that found in the community as a ...whole. The findings suggest that a kindling process is not a clinical hazard following repeated electrically induced seizures.
One hundred forty-eight psychiatric inpatients, 12 outpatients, and 17 normal controls were given the 1.0-mg overnight Dexamethasone Suppression Test (DST), with salivary cortisol concentrations ...being measured as the dependent variable. Based on the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III, the patients were diagnosed as having major depression with melancholia (n = 21), nonmelancholic major depression (n = 50), mania (n = 15), schizophrenia (n = 32), dementia (n = 6), substance dependence/abuse n = 18), and miscellaneous (n = 18). Neither the melancholic major depressives nor the entire group of major depressives had significantly higher salivary cortisol pre- or postdexamethasone as compared with all the other patients combined, nor did the melancholic patients have significantly higher cortisol than the nonmelancholic depressives. The inpatients as a group had significantly higher pre- and postdexamethasone cortisol values than the normal controls; cortisol values for the outpatients were intermediate between these two groups. Illness severity (in the depressives), length of time in hospital before the DST, and medication regimen were all unrelated to DST outcome. Thus, in this study, the salivary cortisol DST showed little clinical utility in discriminating major depressives with and without melancholia from other patients with a broad range of psychiatric diagnoses. The test did distinguish between hospitalized psychiatric patients and normal control subjects and between depressed inpatients and depressed outpatients, indicating that hospitalization-related variables contributed to DST outcome.
The literature on the pharmacotherapy of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is critically reviewed, and suggestions for the appropriate clinical use of psychotropic agents and directions for ...future research are made.
Basal plasma luteinising hormone concentrations and the LH responses to LH-releasing hormone injection were higher in 11 young men after recovery from mania than in 15 control subjects. Since plasma ...concentrations of testosterone and sex hormone binding globulin were similar in the recovered manic compared with the control subjects, the increased LH response to LHRH is likely to have been due to the priming effect of LHRH consequent on an increased release of LHRH into hypophysial portal vessel blood. Abnormal control of LHRH, and thereby LH release, is a state-independent feature in male patients with mania and may be a useful trait marker for this disorder.
A method using 3H2-deoxyglucose was used to identify brain areas activated during partial and generalized amygdaloid kindled seizures and generalized seizures following electro-convulsive shock in ...rats. The amygdala, hippocampus. septal nuclei and hypothalamus were bilaterally activated in kindled convulsions. Electroshock caused a more widespread involvement including the thalamus, striatum, reticular formation and cerebellum. Changes in the amygdala and hippocampus but not hypothalamus, were found after partial kindling.
Schizophrenia and chromosomes Blackwood, D H; Muir, W J; St Clair, D M ...
The Lancet (British edition),
12/1989, Letnik:
2, Številka:
8677
Journal Article
Several psychophysiological abnormalities associated with schizophrenia have been proposed as genetic trait markers of vulnerability to the disorder. Smooth pursuit eye tracking dysfunction and ...abnormal long latency event-related potentials are the most promising candidates. Both are independent of the effects of psychotropic medication or mental state at the time of testing, and twin studies demonstrate that each has a high level of heritability. Having recorded smooth pursuit eye tracking and event-related potentials in 20 high-density schizophrenic families, we find abnormalities in one or both measures in most of the families studied. The abnormalities, when present, occur in the family members with schizophrenia and other forms of functional psychosis, and they have a bimodal distribution with approximately half the nonschizophrenic relatives also showing eye tracking dysfunction and/or abnormal event-related potentials. Some of these relatives had psychiatric symptoms; others were normal. Our results suggest that psychophysiological examination can help to clarify the boundaries of schizophrenia spectrum disorder. By helping to decide the phenotypic status of nonschizophrenic family members, this should increase the power of DNA linkage studies.
The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III (SCID), Newcastle Endogenous/Reactive Index, Feinberg-Carroll Discriminant Index, and Hamilton Depression Scale were used to assess 70 depressed patients ...in order to determine similarities and differences in symptom structure and severity in those patients with and without endogenous/melancholic depression. All patients with melancholia according to DSM-III had definite endogenous major depression by the Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC), but only 20 out of 35 patients with RDC definite endogenous depression were DSM-III melancholic. There was a greater difference in symptom pattern between those patients with definite endogenous depression and those with probable or non-endogenous depression than there was between the melancholic and non-melancholic definite endogenous depressives. A prerequisite for the valid delineation of a nosological category is the establishment of good reliability for diagnostic criteria. Using SCID ratings of audiotaped interviews of 9 patients (5 with major depression), the 8 raters in this study achieved a kappa coefficient of 0.79, suggesting that the use of a structured interview can improve the reliability of DSM-III diagnoses. Interrater reliabilities for most of the individual DSM-III major depressive episode and melancholia items were reasonable, but some were low. The low reliabilities could be improved by redefinition of the items to reduce ambiguity and by development of a SCID glossary.
The effect of atropine on kindling the amygdala of rats was tested by administering the drug in a dose of 25 mg/kg 1 h before each stimulus was applied. Rats tested with atropine kindled at the same ...rate as saline-treated controls. Cholinergic activity in the amygdala of rats was assessed, 4 weeks after the completion of kindling, by measuring both muscarinic receptor numbers and sodium-dependent high affinity choline uptake in tissue homogenates. There was no change in either of these parameters attributable to kindling. These results suggest that changes in the cholinergic system are not fundamental either to the development or the maintenance of kindling in the rat amygdala.
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