PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Armand Hausmann

Publications and source records attributed to Armand Hausmann.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Never too old for eating disorders or body dissatisfaction: a community study of elderly women.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study is to examine eating behavior and body attitude in elderly women. METHOD: A randomly selected nonclinical sample of 1,000 women, aged 60-70 years, was contacted for our questionnaire survey covering current eating behavior, weight history, weight control, body attitude, and disordered eating (DSM-IV). RESULTS: The 475 (48%) women included in our analyses had a mean BMI of 25.1 but desired a mean BMI of 23.3. More than 80% controlled their weight and over 60% stated body dissatisfaction. Eighteen women (3.8%; 95% confidence interval: 2.3-5.9%) met criteria for eating disorders (ED; N = 1 anorexia nervosa, N = 2 bulimia nervosa, and N = 15 EDNOS) and 21 (4.4%) reported single symptoms of an ED. CONCLUSION: Although EDs and body dissatisfaction are typical for young women, they do occur in female elderly and therefore should be included in the differential diagnosis of elderly presenting with weight loss, weight phobia, and/or vomiting.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2006

[Adverse cognitive effects and ECT].

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a rapidly acting and highly effective treatment for severe and life threatening conditions seen in affective and schizophrenic diseases. Notwithstanding its therapeutic benefits, ECT remains controversial because of seizure induction, cognitive side effects, memory dysfunction and effects on cerebral physiology. These factors have raised the concern that ECT produces structural and functional brain damages. This issue continues to have a major impact on the acceptance of ECT as a therapeutic modality, both within the medical community and in public opinion. A close look at incidence, type, severity, neurofunctional and -anatomical correlates, aetiology and therapeutic approaches of the adverse cognitive effects attributed to ECT may contribute to rational and objective handling of this topic. The final chapter deals with the issue of whether ECT causes brain damage.

Amnesia, Retrograde↗
PubMed2006

Executive function and memory in relation to olfactory deficits in alcohol-dependent patients.

BACKGROUND: Prior research indicates that chronic alcoholism is accompanied by olfactory deficits. These have been suggested to reflect dysfunctions in olfactory brain regions. The present study investigated the role of neurocognitive functioning in tests (executive function and memory) sensitive to the functional integrity of brain areas that are crucial to olfactory processing in patients with alcohol dependence. METHODS: Performance on olfactory functions (detection threshold, quality discrimination, identification), executive function (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test), and memory (German version of the California Verbal Learning Test) was assessed in 32 alcohol-dependent patients and 30 healthy comparison subjects, comparable in age, gender, and smoking status. RESULTS: Compared with controls, alcohol-dependent patients were impaired in all 3 domains, olfactory functions, executive function, and memory. In patients, olfactory discrimination ability was positively correlated with executive function performance. Regression analyses conducted to clarify the relation between group (patients vs controls), executive function, memory, and olfactory functions indicated that group was the only significant predictor of olfactory detection threshold and identification, and both group and executive function were found to be the significant predictors of olfactory discrimination. CONCLUSIONS: Olfactory deficits in alcohol dependence appear to be associated with prefrontal cognitive dysfunction. Results indicate that olfactory quality discrimination deficits are related to executive function impairment. These findings add to the available research on frontal lobe dysfunction in alcoholism, suggesting that alcohol-related olfactory discrimination deficits may be associated with impairment in the functional integrity of the prefrontal lobe.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Predictors of antidepressant response in clinical trials of transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Although previous clinical trials have suggested that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has a significant antidepressant effect, the results of these trials are heterogeneous. We hypothesized that individual patients' characteristics might contribute to such heterogeneity. Our aim was to identify predictors of antidepressant response to rTMS. We pooled data from six separate clinical trials conducted independently, which evaluated the effects of rapid rTMS of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in patients with major depression. We investigated 195 patients with regard to demographic, depression and treatment characteristics, psychiatric and drug history. Results showed that age and treatment refractoriness were significant negative predictors of depression improvement when adjusting these variables to other significant predictors and confounders. These findings were not confounded by methodological differences from the six studies, as the results were adjusted for the study site. In conclusion TMS antidepressant therapy in younger and less treatment-resistant patients is associated with better outcome.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Longitudinal volumetric MRI study in first- and multiple-episode male schizophrenia patients.

In this longitudinal study we compared brain volume changes in first- and multiple-episode patients with schizophrenia to normal aging changes observed in healthy control subjects scanned at comparable times. Two to four years after an initial examination including MRI volumetry, we followed up 21 first episode patients, 17 patients after multiple episodes of schizophrenia, and 20 healthy controls. Volumetric measurements of left and right hemispheres, total brain volume, lateral ventricles, hippocampus and amygdala as well as a clinical evaluation were performed. Patients with schizophrenia showed significant ventricular enlargement and volume reduction of the hippocampus-amygdala complex compared with healthy control subjects both at baseline and follow-up. While there were no differences between patients and controls with respect to mean annual volume changes in the measured regions, patients with schizophrenia showed higher between-subject variability in ventricular volume change. These data are consistent with cross-sectional studies demonstrating ventricular enlargement and hippocampal volume deficits in schizophrenia. However, we were not able to demonstrate a difference in the rate of volume changes over time that distinguished patients with schizophrenia from healthy controls for any of the brain structures measured. Drawbacks of the study are that the follow-up was done after a relatively short interval and that there was a difference in time to follow-up and age between patients and controls. Our results do not support the hypothesis that schizophrenia leads to progressive volume reduction in these areas, although there may be a subset of patients with morphologically visible disease progression.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Trends in the pharmacological treatment of patients with schizophrenia over a 12 year observation period.

In this study we evaluated whether our efforts to promote evidence-based guidelines for the psychopharmacological treatment of patients with schizophrenia have led to measurable changes of treatment practice in our hospital by investigating three primary hypotheses: 1) Polypharmacy has become less common in recent years, 2) Conventional neuroleptics have been replaced by second generation antipsychotics; and 3) Dosing regimes have changed towards lower doses. We have therefore collected data from the clinical records of all in-patients with ICD-9/ICD-10 diagnoses of schizophrenia hospitalized at the Department of Psychiatry of the Medical University Innsbruck in the years 1989, 1995, 1998 and 2001. Data from 1989 to 1998 showed a significant decrease in the use of two or more antipsychotics given simultaneously. Contrary to our hypothesis, there was a significant increase in polypharmacy between 1998 and 2001. The predominant use of second generation antipsychotics became standard in schizophrenia treatment. In this context the decrease of concomitant anticholinergic medication is notable. Doses of conventional antipsychotics like haloperidol as well as doses of risperidone decreased whereas doses of other second generation antipsychotics increased. All in all, the pharmacological management of schizophrenia patients is increasingly in tune with current treatment guidelines.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Childhood body-focused behaviors and social behaviors as risk factors of eating disorders.

BACKGROUND: The risk factors for adolescent eating disorders are poorly understood. It is generally agreed, however, that interactions with one's body and interactions with others are two important features in the development of anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Therefore, we assessed a variety of childhood body-focused behaviors and childhood social behaviors in eating-disordered patients as compared to non-eating-disordered subjects. METHOD: We compared 50 female inpatients with eating disorders (anorexia or bulimia nervosa), 50 female inpatients with polysubstance dependence, and 50 nonpatient female control subjects with no history of eating or substance abuse disorders (all defined by DSM-IV criteria), using a semi-structured interview of our own design. We asked questions about (1) childhood body-focused behaviors (e.g. thumb-sucking) and body-focused family experiences (e.g. bodily caresses), and (2) childhood social behaviors (e.g. numbers of close friends) and family social styles (e.g. authoritarian upbringing). RESULTS: Many body-focused measures, such as feeding problems, auto-aggressive behavior, lack of maternal caresses, and family taboos regarding nudity and sexuality, characterized eating-disordered patients as opposed to both comparison groups, as did several social behaviors, such as adjustment problems at school and lack of close friends. However, nail-biting, insecure parental bonding, and childhood physical and sexual abuse were equally elevated in both psychiatric groups. CONCLUSION: It appears that eating-disordered patients, as compared to substance-dependent patients and healthy controls, show a distinct pattern of body-focused and social behaviors during childhood, characterized by self-harm, a rigid and 'body-denying' family climate, and lack of intimacy.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Olfactory functioning in patients with alcohol dependence: impairments in odor judgements.

AIMS: Prior studies indicate that alcohol-dependent patients have impaired olfactory sensitivity, odor quality discrimination and identification ability. However, olfactory functioning with regard to the immediate, perception driven odor associations is unknown. Therefore, this study assessed olfactory judgements in nonamnesic and nondemented patients with alcohol dependence. METHODS: Thirty alcohol-dependent patients and 30 healthy control subjects, well matched for gender, age and smoking status, and screened for olfactory sensitivity, were asked to rate intensity, familiarity, edibility and pleasantness of 16 odors using visual rating scales. RESULTS: Compared with controls, patients showed lower scores in odor familiarity and impaired edibility judgements. These impairments were observed bilaterally, were present independently of age, gender, general mental abilities and length of abstinence, and not attributable to smoking or impaired olfactory sensitivity. No differences between groups were found in odor intensity and pleasantness judgements. CONCLUSION: These results extend prior findings of alcohol-related olfactory deficits, indicating impairments in olfactory processes of odor familiarity and edibility in alcohol-dependent patients. Although the basis of these deficits is still unknown, our finding of a distinct pattern of olfactory functional impairment and sparing (intensity, pleasantness) [corrected] suggests that there is no generalized [corrected] olfactory dysfunction, but [corrected] neural olfactory networks may be affected differently. However, alcoholism appears to be associated with a variety of disturbances in olfactory processing [corrected]

Alcoholism↗
PubMed2004

Body fat perception in eating-disordered men.

OBJECTIVE: We sought to assess the relative roles of body fat ideals and body fat perception in men with eating disorders. METHOD: We compared 27 men meeting criteria for a current eating disorder (17 with anorexia nervosa and 10 with bulimia nervosa), 21 male mountain climbers, and 21 control men, using a computerized test of body image, the "somatomorphic matrix." RESULTS: When asked to choose the body that they "ideally would like to have," men with eating disorders selected an image with body fat closely comparable to that chosen by the control men. On perceived body fat, however, the groups differed dramatically. The eating-disordered men perceived themselves to be almost twice as fat as they actually were, whereas the control subjects showed virtually no such distortion. These findings resemble those of a previous study of women, which found that women dieters showed abnormal body fat perception, but not body fat ideals, when compared with non-dieters. CONCLUSION: These observations suggest that distorted body perception, rather than body ideal, may be central to eating disorders in men. This distinction may be important for both research and therapy.

Adipose Tissue↗
PubMed2004

No deterioration of cognitive performance in an aggressive unilateral and bilateral antidepressant rTMS add-on trial.

BACKGROUND: Cognitive functions were assessed before and following a course of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in patients with depression participating in a sham-controlled, randomized trial of rTMS as adjunct to antidepressant treatment. METHOD: Forty-one medicated inpatients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of a depressive episode were consecutively randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups comparing 2 active rTMS conditions with sham stimulation. The rTMS was applied either at high frequency over the left dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) (10 sessions x 10 trains x 10 seconds 20 Hz at 100% motor threshold [MT], 90-second intertrain interval) or in a combined high- and low-frequency manner to the left and right DLPFC, respectively (10 sessions x 1 train x 10 minutes at 120% MT). Thirty-eight patients completed a neuropsychological test battery at baseline and following day 14. The cognitive assessment focused on motor skills, attention, executive functions, learning, and memory. Data were collected from November 1999 to August 2002. RESULTS: Active treatment groups did not differ with respect to assessed cognitive measures and thus were pooled. A comparison of short-term changes (baseline-day 14) in neuropsychological performance revealed a more favorable time course of the actively treated patients for encoding in the verbal memory test compared with the sham-stimulated patients. CONCLUSIONS: Unilateral rTMS as well as bilateral combined rTMS revealed no detrimental effects on cognition, as compared with the sham group. Moreover, neither the add-on design nor the used aggressive parameters had a negative impact on cognitive measures in comparison with sham. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation might have mild beneficial cognitive effects partly independent of its antidepressant efficacy.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Body-image dissatisfaction in gay versus heterosexual men: is there really a difference?

BACKGROUND: Gay men are thought to experience body-image concerns or disorders more frequently than heterosexual men. It is unclear, however, whether these putative concerns are due to unrealistic body ideals (aspiring to a body shape that is difficult or impossible to attain), body-image distortion (misperceiving the actual shape of one's body), or both. METHOD: We administered a well-established computerized body-image test, the "somatomorphic matrix," to 37 gay men recruited from the community in April 1999 and compared the results with previous data from 49 community-recruited heterosexual comparison men and 24 clinic-recruited heterosexual men with eating disorders. RESULTS: Gay men were indistinguishable from the community-recruited heterosexual comparison men on measures of both body ideals and body-image distortion. By contrast, eating-disordered men were significantly distinguishable from both other groups on body-image distortion. The lack of differences between community gay and heterosexual men on body-image indices seems unlikely to represent a type II error, since the somatomorphic matrix showed ample power to detect abnormalities in the eating-disordered men, despite the smaller sample size of the latter group. CONCLUSION: Contrary to our hypotheses, gay men did not differ significantly from heterosexual men on measures of body image. These unexpected findings cast doubt on the widespread belief that gay men experience greater body-image dissatisfaction than heterosexual men. If our findings are valid, it follows that some previous studies of body image in gay men may possibly have been influenced by selection bias.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Brain activation patterns during a selective attention test-a functional MRI study in healthy volunteers and patients with schizophrenia.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to compare cortical activation patterns in healthy volunteers with those in patients with schizophrenia during a modified verbal Stroop task. Healthy subjects (n=13) and patients with schizophrenia (n=13) on stable antipsychotic treatment, matched on demographic variables, were included. Patients were preselected on the basis of good performance on a selective attention test. Patients with schizophrenia showed a significantly increased pattern of activation in the left and right inferior frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. A significant negative correlation between activation of the left prefrontal cortex and accuracy in the modified Stroop test was observed for healthy controls but not schizophrenia patients. Although both groups recruited the prefrontal cortex during the modified Stroop task, for the schizophrenia patients this activation was bilateral, whereas for the controls this activation was primarily in the left hemisphere, suggesting that patients with schizophrenia recruited more prefrontal regions to perform the task with the same accuracy as healthy controls. Our findings of increased activity across multiple areas of the brain, including dorsolateral frontal cortex and anterior cingulate, in patients with schizophrenia who perform relatively well on a task of selective attention give further evidence that task performance may be a confounding factor in the interpretation of neuroimaging results.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Family study of affective spectrum disorder.

BACKGROUND: Affective spectrum disorder (ASD) represents a group of psychiatric and medical conditions, each known to respond to several chemical families of antidepressant medications and hence possibly linked by common heritable abnormalities. Forms of ASD include major depressive disorder (MDD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bulimia nervosa, cataplexy, dysthymic disorder, fibromyalgia, generalized anxiety disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and social phobia. Two predictions of the ASD hypothesis were tested: that ASD, taken as a single entity, would aggregate in families and that MDD would coaggregate with other forms of ASD in families. METHODS: Probands with and without MDD, together with their first-degree relatives, were interviewed using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV and a supplemental interview for other forms of ASD. The familial aggregation and coaggregation of disorders were analyzed using proband predictive logistic regression models, including a novel bivariate model for the presence or absence of each of 2 disorders in a relative as predicted by the presence or absence of each of 2 disorders in the associated proband. RESULTS: In the 178 interviewed relatives of 64 probands with MDD and 152 relatives of 58 probands without MDD, the estimated odds ratio (95% confidence interval) for the familial aggregation of ASD as a whole was 2.5 (1.4-4.3; P =.001) and for the familial coaggregation of MDD with at least one other form of ASD was 1.9 (1.1-3.2; P =.02). CONCLUSIONS: Affective spectrum disorder aggregates strongly in families, and MDD displays a significant familial coaggregation with other forms of ASD, taken collectively. These results suggest that forms of ASD may share heritable pathophysiologic features.

Anxiety Disorders↗
PubMed2003

Reduced olfactory sensitivity, discrimination, and identification in patients with alcohol dependence.

BACKGROUND: Various olfactory deficits have been reported in the alcohol-induced amnestic syndrome (Korsakoff's syndrome). Less is known about olfactory functioning in nonamnesic and nondemented alcoholic patients. METHODS: Olfactory performance of 30 alcohol-dependent patients was assessed unirhinally using the Sniffin' Sticks (threshold, discrimination, identification, composite TDI score) and compared with that of 30 healthy controls, matched for sex, age, and smoking status. RESULTS: Patients showed significantly reduced olfactory sensitivity (higher threshold), discrimination, and identification compared with controls. No group differences were observed in laterality. Identification and discrimination group differences remained significant after controlling for differences in sensitivity. Olfactory deficits in patients were present independent of age, gender, and duration of abstinence (<3 months) and were not attributable to smoking or general cognitive abilities. More than half of the patients (56.7%) could be classified as hyposmic. Lower overall olfactory functioning (TDI) was associated with longer duration of a regular alcohol intake and higher values of gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT). CONCLUSIONS: Olfactory dysfunction is common in nonamnesic and nondemented patients with alcohol dependence. Results suggest a detrimental effect of alcohol on central olfactory processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Combining high and low frequencies in rTMS antidepressive treatment: preliminary results.

The antidepressive potency of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) seems to depend on variables such as the stimulation placements, different frequencies, stimulus intensities, coil shape and interstimulus intervals. The aim of this pilot study was to investigate the augmentation properties of rTMS combining low and high frequencies. Thirty six depressed medicated in-patients were recruited and assigned to three different rTMS treatment modalities as an add-on strategy (each n = 12). In group 1 a stimulus intensity of 110% of the motor threshold (MT) was used with a frequency of 10 Hz over the left dorsolatero prefrontal cortex (DLPC). The right DLPC was stimulated in the same session with 110% MT at 1 Hz. In group 2 the patients were stimulated only over the left DLPC with alternating trains of 110% MT at 10 Hz and trains of 110% MT at 1 Hz in the same session. In group 3 the high frequency stimulation over the left DLPC was performed as an internal control group. None of the treatment modalities was superior but different side effects were observed. These preliminary findings suggest that rTMS, at varying frequencies and stimulation placements, evokes different psychoactive effects of clinical relevance.

Depressive Disorder↗