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C Tannock

Publications and source records attributed to C Tannock.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

Personality disorder and psychopathology in Tourette's syndrome: a controlled study.

BACKGROUND: Some specialists associate a wide variety of psychopathologies with Tourette's syndrome (TS), while others suggest that there is no psychopathology specifically associated. Few controlled studies have been conducted to address this issue, and none has investigated personality disorder in TS. METHOD: Adults with TS and controls were evaluated using standardised psychiatric rating scales, including self-rated (STPCD) and clinician-rated (SCID-II) assessments of personality disorder, to investigate associations between personality disorder, other psychopathology and TS. RESULTS: Significantly more TS patients (25/39 (64%)) than controls (2/34 (6%)) had one or more personality disorders. TS subjects were also more likely to have more personality disorders. TS patients had significantly more depression, anxiety and obsessionality than controls. The SCID-II and STCPD were moderately well correlated. CONCLUSIONS: TS patients have a high prevalence of personality disorder and psychopathology when compared with controls. These results are the first to suggest a high level of personality disorder in a TS clinic population.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Brain MR in chronic fatigue syndrome.

PURPOSE: To determine the prevalence of MR white matter abnormalities in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). METHODS: Brain MR studies of 43 patients (29 women and 14 men, 22 to 78 years old) with a clinical diagnosis of CFS (n = 15), CFS with associated depression (n = 14), and CFS with associated other psychiatric disorders, namely, anxiety and somatization disorder (n = 14), were compared with brain MR studies in 43 age- and sex-matched control subjects. RESULTS: MR findings were abnormal in 13 (32%) of the patients in the study group (ages 34 to 78 years) and in 12 (28%) of the control subjects (ages 26 to 73 years). One patient with CFS had multiple areas of demyelination in the supratentorial periventricular white matter. Another patient with CFS and associated depression had a single focus of probable demyelination in the supratentorial periventricular white matter. In four patients with CFS (ages 34 to 48 years) MR abnormalities consisted of one or several punctate hyperintense foci in the corona radiata, centrum ovale, and frontal white matter. The remaining seven patients (ages 50 to 78 years) had frontoparietal subcortical white matter foci of high T2 signal. The prevalence of white matter hyperintensities was not different between the patients and the control subjects. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that no MR pattern of white matter abnormalities is specific to CFS.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Minor depression in the aged. Concepts, prevalence and optimal management.

Research evidence indicates that depressive symptoms, or subsyndromal cases of minor or mild depression are very common in the elderly population. However, the nosological status of minor depression is poorly and variable defined, with no current consensus. DSM-IV has, however, introduced a research category of minor depression for future validation and discussion, involving a smaller number of depressive symptoms to obtain a diagnosis than is required for major depression. The elderly population are particularly prone to subsyndromal depression because of their increased tendency to alexithymia (the inability of patients to verbalize or fantasize affective experience) and somatisation, which masks their depression. Furthermore, minor depression is not a stable entity and can predict the development of major depression as well as characterise its sequelae when major depression is in partial remission. Most studies have suggested that minor depression is roughly twice as common as major depression, with an increase in frequency in residential or medical inpatients compared with community-dwelling elderly people. Most studies also confirm the notion that minor depression increases in frequency with age in a curvilinear fashion; there is an increase in symptoms in people aged in their 30s, a decrease in middle age, a steady increase in old age and a very steep increase in people aged greater than 80 years. This effect may be attributable to the concomitant increase in physical morbidity in old age, which is closely associated with minor depression. The exact relationship between cause and effect of comorbid physical illnesses is unclear, but the association is strong for a number of common medical disorders. Impairment of well-being and functional disability is marked in minor depression. There are no available data on the relative risk of suicide in minor depression. Treatment remains unclear, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, antidepressant medication and psychotherapeutic interventions, alone or combined, are currently the recommended course of action.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1995

Brainstem perfusion is impaired in chronic fatigue syndrome.

We looked for brain perfusion abnormalities in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). An initial pilot study revealed widespread reduction of regional brain perfusion in 24 ME/CFS patients, compared with 24 normal volunteers. Hypoperfusion of the brainstem (0.72 +/- 0.05 vs. 0.80 +/- 0.04, p < 0.0001) was marked and constant. We then tested whether perfusion to the brainstem in ME/CFS patients differs from that in normals, patients with major depression, and others with epilepsy. Data from a total of 146 subjects were included in the present study: 40 normal volunteers, 67 patients with ME/CFS (24 in the pilot study, 16 with no psychiatric disorders, 13 with ME/CFS and depression, 14 with ME/CFS and other psychiatric disorders), 10 epileptics, 20 young depressed patients and 9 elderly depressed individuals. Brain perfusion ratios were calculated using 99Tcm-hexamethylpropylene amine oxime (99Tcm-HMPAO) and single-photon emission tomography (SPET) with a dedicated three-detector gamma camera computer/system (GE Neurocam). Brain-stem hypoperfusion was confirmed in all ME/CFS patients. Furthermore, the 16 ME/CFS patients with no psychiatric disorders and the initial 24 patients in the pilot study showed significantly lower brainstem perfusion (0.71 +/- 0.03) than did depressed patients (0.77 +/- 0.03; ANOVA, p < 0.0001). Patients with ME/CFS have a generalized reduction of brain perfusion, with a particular pattern of hypoperfusion of the brainstem.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

The gene responsible for Werner syndrome may be a cell division "counting" gene.

Werner syndrome is a rare, autosomal, recessive condition that is frequently studied as a model of some aspects of human aging, although the behavioral changes that are usually associated with old age are only seen very infrequently. A most striking aspect of the phenotype of Werner syndrome, presumably arising from the same gene defect, is a dramatic shortening of the replicative life-span of dermal fibroblasts in vitro. The finite replicative life-span of human cells in vitro is due to the stochastic loss of replicative ability in a continuously increasing fraction of newborn cells at every generation. Normal human fibroblasts achieve approximately 60 population doublings in culture, while Werner syndrome cells usually only achieve approximately 20 population doublings. We describe an analysis of the replicative ability of fibroblasts from Werner syndrome patients and demonstrate that the cells in these cultures usually exit, apparently irreversibly, from the cell cycle at a faster rate than do normal cells, although they mostly start off with a good replicative ability. We propose that the Werner syndrome gene is a "counting" gene controlling the number of times that human cells are able to divide before terminal differentiation.

Adult↗