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Biomedical subjects

E Capitani

Publications and source records attributed to E Capitani.

18 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Guillain-Barré syndrome associated with high titers of anti-GM1 antibodies.

We found high titers of anti-GM1 antibodies (1/1280 or more) in 3 of 14 consecutive patients (21%) with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and in 2 additional patients who developed GBS, 10-11 days after starting parenteral treatment with gangliosides. Antibodies were IgG in 4 patients and IgM in one, and they all bound to asialo-GM1, and, in 3, to GD1b as well. Although the clinical features in all the patients with high anti-GM1 titers fulfilled the criteria for the diagnosis of GBS and in 4 of them, proteins but not cells were elevated in cerebrospinal fluid, electrodiagnostic studies in 3 patients showed prominent signs of axonal degeneration, that in one case were confirmed by morphological studies on sural nerve biopsy. No recent antecedent infection was reported by these patients, but in 3, including patients treated with gangliosides, anti-Campylobacter jejuni antibodies were elevated. In 3 patients a consistent decrease in anti-GM1 levels was observed after the acute phase of the disease suggesting that the frequent occurrence of these antibodies in patients with GBS and their frequent association with a prominent axonal impairment may have pathogenetic relevance.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1992

Recency, primacy, and memory: reappraising and standardising the serial position curve.

In this paper we consider the serial position curve in immediate verbal free recall. A large literature has argued that two components of the serial position curve, recency and primacy, reflect the functioning respectively of short-term and of long-term memory. However, there are a number of difficulties in interpreting the recency effect as a phenomenon uniquely associated with short-term memory. Moreover, the serial position curve has been used widely for clinical investigations in patients with memory deficits. This is despite the lack of norms for the measures derived from the curve. We present a set of standardised norms based on 321 Italian normal subjects. These norms are shown to be applicable both to an English speaking population, and to three groups of brain damaged-patients, namely Alzheimer's, amnesics, and frontals. The standardised norms offer a clinical and experimental tool which, coupled with a multiple single case approach, allows us to show dissociations and double dissociations among the performance patterns obtained from all three pathological groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of a possible interpretation of the recency effect as a emergent property of all types of memory system, including verbal short-term memory. Taking into account previous literature as well as our own data, the recency effect in immediate verbal free recall is here interpreted in terms of a two-component view of verbal short-term memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Influence of rehabilitation on language skills in aphasic patients. A controlled study.

The influence of language rehabilitation on specific language skills (speaking, understanding, writing, and reading) was investigated in 281 aphasic patients (162 reeducated and 119 controls) who were subjected to a second examination no less than six months after the first. The relationship of the following factors to improvement was studied: (a) time between onset of aphasia and first examination; (b) type of aphasia; (c) overall severity of aphasia on first examination; (d) presence or absence of rehabilitation between first and subsequent examination. It was found that rehabilitation has a significant positive effect on improvement in all language skills. Time between onset and first examination and overall severity of aphasia were negatively related to improvement. The relationship of type of asphasia to improvement was not significant. Additional evidence of the efficacy of rehabilitation is provided by experience with patients who began language therapy several months or years after the onset of their language disorder.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Association of glycerol to dexamethasone in treatment of stroke patients.

A prospective study of 93 acute stroke patients randomly selected by type of antiedema treatment given (hypertonic glicerol infusion plus dexamethasone versus dexamethasone alone) failed to elicit any statistically significant difference between the two treatments on survival rates and quality of survival 7 and 30 days after the stroke.

Aged↗
PubMed1979

Direction of spatial error in the copying of visual stimuli: the relevance of focal brain damage.

Hemisphere-damaged patients and control subjects were tested by copying visual stimuli from a large display. The vertical and horizontal components of the errors and the overall accuracy were analysed with the following results: (i) all the subjects displaced downward in the left half of the display and upward in the right half, except for the left hemisphere-damaged patients with visual field defect, (ii) both left and right hemisphere-damaged patients with visual field defect displaced the copied point toward the damaged hemisphere, and generally were inaccurate only in the half of the copying set opposite to the damage hemisphere, without asymmetry between the effect of left and right posterior lesion except for the presence of unilateral neglect only among subjects with right hemisphere lesions.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1978

A preliminary experiment on long-term memory with realistic and abstract visual patterns in uniltateral focal hemisphere-damaged patients.

Sixty-seven focal hemisphere-damaged patients (38 to the left hemisphere and 29 to the right hemisphere) were tested for forgetting of realistic and abstract visual patterns over a 40-sec to 5-min interval by means of a recognition task. No forgetting took place in any group, even if abstract patterns proved to be poorly recognized both at 40 sec and at 5 min. The authors conclude that focal neocortical unilateral lesions do not significantly hamper the semantic code processes involved in the Long-Term Memory of the patterns employed in this experiment.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Do focal neocortical lesions hamper short-term recognition of visual spatial patterns?

A hundred and forty-three patients with focal - mainly neocortical - hemiphere-damage (subdivided in 4 groups according to the side of the damaged hemisphere and the presence/absence of visual field defect) and 70 controls, were given a 20-sec delay recognition test of complex spatial visual patterns. There was one free delay condition and two conditions with interference from visual material of either similar or quite dissimilar patterns to that of memoranda. The results provided by two co-variance analyses are: (i) the comparison of the hemisphere-damaged groups with controls show a significant memory decay of both right groups only when there was perceptual interference from similar patterns; (ii) the comparisons between hemisphere-damaged groups fail to elicit any significant difference in the three memory conditions. There appears to be no specific neocortical area involved in the first steps of memory processing of spatial informations and the interference engendered by interpolated perceptual activity is material-specific.

Adult↗
PubMed1977

Decision in ambiguity: hemispheric dominance or interaction?

Fifty-eight subjects were shown tachistoscopically grey rectangles, at the centre of the field of vision. The rectangles extended equally to the left and right of the visual fixation point, and were presented under four background conditions: all white, all black, white in the left half of the field and black in the right half, black in the left and white in the right half. "Chimerical" backgrounds were assumed to create an interhemispheric ambiguity in the perception of the greyness of the stimuli as a consequence of opposed brightness contrasts. The reported birghtness was therefore expected to reflect a hemispheric dominance or an interhemispheric averaging of information. The results of the experiment supported the second hypothesis.

Discrimination, Psychological↗
PubMed1976

Cerebral dominance and visual similarity judgements.

Visual similarity judgements among rectangles varying in form and area were investigated in control subjects and in patients with lesions confined to either cerebral hemisphere. While an overweighing of form with respect to area was found in both control subjects and right brain-damaged, left brain-damaged patients equally weighted the two relevant dimensions. Beyond revealing differential processing rules related to the side of the injury in the brain, the findings lend themselves to some speculation about cerebral dominance.

Brain Damage, Chronic↗
PubMed1976

Halving a horizontal segment: a study on hemisphere-damaged patients with cerebral focal lesions.

The aim of this study was to point out a hemisphere asymmetry in focal brain-damaged patients and a hand asymmetry in normals on halving binocularly a horizontal line. 50 left hemisphere and 53 right hemisphere patients (both subdivided by presence/absence of visual field defect) and 50 controls (divided by the hand they used to carry out the task) were employed. 4 differently long segments made up the test material and the error scores with respect to the geometric midpoint were worked out by means of parametric statistical procedures. It turned out that: (i) healthy subjects committed a mean leftward displacement, regardless of the hand they used. All the same, only the halving error committed by the right hand is significant keeping as reference the geometric midpoint of the segment; (ii) left and right hemisphere-damaged patients committed halving errors, that are opposite in direction, leftward for the former and rightward for the latter; (iii) the behaviour of right patients with visual field defects is the only to be significantly different from that of the corresponding controls. Our findings point to prevailing importance of the right hemisphere mainly of its posterior areas, in the halving task.

Brain Damage, Chronic↗
PubMed1975

Focal hemisphere and visuoperceptual categorization.

Visuoperceptual categorization was investigated in patients with unilateral brain damage by a task in which meaningless shapes had to be classified with reference to a number of prototype patterns. Right brain-damaged subjects with visual field defect turned out to have a narrower categorization span. As this outcome seems to be scarcely consonant with a lower level disorder of visual processing, a major competence of the right hemisphere is suggested for visuoperceptual categorization.

Brain Mapping↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Left hemisphere lesion and visual recognition of single letters (author's transl)].

100 Controls and 200 left hemisphere-damaged patients were sub-divided by means of a Standard Language Battery in 35 non Aphasic patients, 51 Broca's aphasic patients, 85 Wernicke's aphasic patients and 29 global aphasics. They were all submitted to a single letter recognition test. From a parametric statistical work-out of the experimental data, it turned out that global aphasics are by far the most impaired experimental group, even if their performance had been adjusted by co-variance taking into account their more relevant aphasic and neurological disorders. Whilst age and length of illness do not play a significant role in the test performance, this was significant for the educational level (years of schooling) and for the severity of the aphasic disorders (Token Test). The relationship between the above-mentioned independent variables and the letter recognition scores did not change significantly across the experimental groups. The only exception was that the relation between the Token Test and the letter recognition scores proved to be significantly different between Broca's and Global Aphasics. No definite conclusion could be drawn about the outstandingly poor scores of global aphasics, as neither their performance or their I.Q. (W.A.I.S.) seemed to be related to the letter recognition scores (in contrast with Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics), nor to the presence of retro-geniculate visual field defects.

Aphasia↗