Cognitive Impairment and Personality Adjustment in Vietnam Veterans

This study investigated the intellectual functioning and personality characteristics of 81 Australian ex-servicemen, 42 of whom had served in Vietnam. A Cognitive Impairment Model (SCIM) developed by Savage (1978, 1981, 1984) enabled intellectual functioning levels, intellectual deterioration and learning ability in the verbal and performance modalities to be asses. The Clinical Analysis Questionnaire (CAQ) of Krug (1980) based 00 Cattell's theory and personality measurement techniques provided an assessment of normal personality characteristics and clinical factors. The data suggested that the two groups, Australian ex-servicemen and Australian Vietnam veterans, were relatively homogeneous with regard to cognitive functioning and gave no indication of impairment in their intellectual levels or of their learning ability. Significant personality differences were, however, found between the two groups of ex-servicemen. The Vietnam veterans showed significantly more tension, depression, guilt, resentment, alienation and hypochondriasis than their colleagues who had remained in Australia. They were more withdrawn from others and from reality and had more abnormal thought than the ex-servicemen who had not been to Vietnam. The cognitive data do not support the view that Vietnam veterans suffered from any serious cognitive impairment. The personality data, however, suggest a significant “Psycbological Stress Syndrome” in these Vietnam veterans which required professional psychological treatment.     

Midline Thalamic Damage Associated with Alcohol-Use Disorders: Disruption of Distinct Thalamocortical Pathways and Function

Neuropsychology Review - The thalamus, a significant part of the diencephalon, is a symmetrical and bilateral central brain structure. The thalamus is subdivided into three major groups of nuclei...     

Diencephalic damage decreases hippocampal acetylcholine release during spontaneous alternation testing

A rodent model of diencephalic amnesia, pyrithiamine-induced thiamine deficiency (PTD), was used to investigate diencephalic-hippocampal interactions. Acetylcholine (ACh) release, a marker of memory-related activation, was measured in the hippocampus of PTD-treated and control rats prior to, during, and after spontaneous alternation test. During behavioral testing, all animals displayed increases in ACh release. However, both the percent increase of ACh release during spontaneous alternation testing and the alternation scores were higher in control rats relative to PTD-treated rats. Thus, when rats are tested on a task with demands dependent on the hippocampus, it appears that the hippocampus is not fully activated after diencephalic damage.     

One size does not fit all: face emotion processing impairments in semantic dementia, behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease are mediated by distinct cognitive deficits

Patients with frontotemporal dementia (both behavioural variant [bvFTD] and semantic dementia [SD]) as well as those with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show deficits on tests of face emotion processing, yet the mechanisms underlying these deficits have rarely been explored. We compared groups of patients with bvFTD (n = 17), SD (n = 12) or AD (n = 20) to an age- and education-matched group of healthy control subjects (n = 36) on three face emotion processing tasks (Ekman 60, Emotion Matching and Emotion Selection) and found that all three patient groups were similarly impaired. Analyses of covariance employed to partial out the influences of language and perceptual impairments, which frequently co-occur in these patients, provided evidence of different underlying cognitive mechanisms. These analyses revealed that language impairments explained the original poor scores obtained by the SD patients on the Ekman 60 and Emotion Selection tasks, which involve verbal labels. Perceptual deficits contributed to Emotion Matching performance in the bvFTD and AD patients. Importantly, all groups remained impaired on one task or more following these analyses, denoting a primary emotion processing disturbance in these dementia syndromes. These findings highlight the multifactorial nature of emotion processing deficits in patients with dementia.     

The Laboratory-Clinician Team: A Professional Call to Action to Improve Communication and Collaboration for Optimal Patient Care in Chromosomal Microarray Testing

The International Standards for Cytogenomic Arrays (ISCA) Consortium is a worldwide collaborative effort dedicated to optimizing patient care by improving the quality of chromosomal microarray testing. The primary effort of the ISCA Consortium has been the development of a database of copy number variants (CNVs) identified during the course of clinical microarray testing. This database is a powerful resource for clinicians, laboratories, and researchers, and can be utilized for a variety of applications, such as facilitating standardized interpretations of certain CNVs across laboratories or providing phenotypic information for counseling purposes when published data is sparse. A recognized limitation to the clinical utility of this database, however, is the quality of clinical information available for each patient. Clinical genetic counselors are uniquely suited to facilitate the communication of this information to the laboratory by virtue of their existing clinical responsibilities, case management skills, and appreciation of the evolving nature of scientific knowledge. We intend to highlight the critical role that genetic counselors play in ensuring optimal patient care through contributing to the clinical utility of the ISCA Consortium's database, as well as the quality of individual patient microarray reports provided by contributing laboratories. Current tools, paper and electronic forms, created to maximize this collaboration are shared. In addition to making a professional commitment to providing complete clinical information, genetic counselors are invited to become ISCA members and to become involved in the discussions and initiatives within the Consortium.     

Have recent studies addressed methodological issues raised by five decades of television violence research? A critical review

Media violence continues to be a concern to parents, policy makers and researchers. In spite of confidence expressed by some that exposure to television violence causes serious aggression and violent crime, critics hold that serious flaws in research methodology limits or nullifies conclusions drawn from widely-cited studies. In this paper, we will examine a series of classic studies for lessons learned about conducting media violence research, and assess whether recent publications adhere to those standards. We conclude that empirical reports with serious flaws continue to be published, compromising our ability to understand this phenomenon.     

Fabricated Illness: Working within the Family System to Find a Pathway to Health

The term medically unexplained symptoms refers to a clinical presentation where the child's symptoms and impairment cannot be explained by any known organic pathology, and may include conversion disorders, somatoform pain disorders, factitious disorder, and factitious disorder by proxy. In this case study, we present our treatment of a 9‐year‐old girl with a 2‐year history of medically unexplained abdominal cramping and vaginal discharge. During the 9 months that we worked with this family, we were never able to clarify in our own minds the source of the child's symptoms—that is, who was responsible for their induction or who was the instigator or maintainer of the exaggerated symptoms. Nor did we come to fully understand the function of the symptoms in the family system. Our case report does not answer either of these questions. Instead, we describe how we worked with the family despite the ongoing ambiguities as to why the symptoms were occurring and who was inducing them. The functional outcome was disappearance of symptoms, return to full school attendance, and improved parenting behavior.     

The Impact of Right Temporal Lobe Epilepsy On Nonverbal Memory: Meta-regression of Stimulus- and Task-related Moderators

Neuropsychology Review - Nonverbal memory tests have great potential value for detecting the impact of lateralized pathology and predicting the risk of memory loss following right temporal lobe...     

Cerebellar Tasks do not Distinguish Between Children with Developmental Dyslexia and Children with Intellectual Disability

This paper explored the claim that only children with developmental dyslexia, whose reading ability is discrepant from their average general reasoning ability show specific deficits in motor tasks assessing cerebellar functioning (Fawcett et al., 2001 Fawcett, A. J. and Nicolson, R. I. 2001. “Dyslexia: The role of the cerebellum”. In Dyslexia: Theory and good practice, Edited by: Fawcett, A. J. 89–105. London: Whurr.  [Google Scholar], Cerebellar tests differentiate between groups of poor readers with and without IQ discrepancy. J. Learning Disabilities, 34, 119) and rapid serial naming (RAN, Wolf & Bowers, 1999 Wolf, M. and Bowers, P. 1999. The double deficit hypothesis for the developmental dyslexias. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91: 1–24. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], The double deficit hypothesis for the developmental dyslexias. J. Educ. Psychol., 91, 1). All available children between the ages of 11 and 14 were recruited from two special schools for children with either (a) formally-diagnosed intellectual disabilities (N?=?18); or (b) formal diagnoses of developmental dyslexia (N?=?25). These two groups of children did not differ on gender, age, pseudoword decoding abilities, or on 7 of 8 literacy measures, but did differ significantly, as expected on verbal and non-verbal reasoning tasks. Importantly, there were no deficits in bead threading ability or postural stability in the children with developmental dyslexia compared to the children with intellectual disabilities. There were also no between-group differences in rapid naming measures. The present results therefore provide no support for the claim that cerebellar deficits or RAN distinguish between children with dyslexia and children with intellectual disabilities that include reading.