Biomedical subjects
Lajos Farkas
Publications and source records attributed to Lajos Farkas.
[Victimization and alcohol problems in the families of disabled persons].
Few research data are available on the addiction problems that occur in the families of persons living with disability. There is even less information on the extent of violence disabled people experience in their families as violence directed at them, and little is known how this is connected to alcohol and drug use that may occur in the families of the different groups of disabled persons as compared to healthy control samples. We sought an answer to this question through a case-control study involving 245 young people with disability and 60 healthy controls, using structured interview methods (EuropASI, EuroADAD) and self-assessment questionnaires (Temperament and Character Inventory, Juvenile Victimisation Questionnaire, Child Abuse and Trauma Scale). The presence of a drinking problem in the family was clearly identified as a predictor of an increased risk of victimization, of the occurrence of various types of victimization events, and of their greater frequency. The strong effect of a drinking problem in the family on substance use, psychiatric state and difficulties in aggression management was also confirmed. The predictive effect of a drinking problem was manifested in various ways in different disability groups. Our data draw attention to the link between victimization and drinking problems that can be observed in the families of disabled people, and to the importance of prevention which could help in improving the quality of life of the persons living with disability.
A case report: Pavlovian conditioning as a risk factor of heroin 'overdose' death.
BACKGROUND: The authors present a case illustrating a mechanism leading directly to death which is not rare but has received little attention. CASE PRESENTATION: The case was evaluated by autopsy, investigation of morphine concentration in the blood, and clinical data. The heroin dose causing the 'overdose' death of a young man who had previously been treated a number of times for heroin addiction did not differ from his dose of the previous day taken in the accustomed circumstances. The accustomed dose taken in a strange environment caused fatal complications because the conditioned tolerance failed to operate. The concentration of morphine in the blood did not exceed the level measured during earlier treatment. CONCLUSION: These results are in line with the data in the literature indicating that morphine concentrations measured in cases of drug-related death do not differ substantially from those measured in cases where the outcome is not fatal. A knowledge of the conditioning mechanism can contribute to prevention of fatal cases of a similar type. The harm reduction approach places great stress on preventive intervention based on data related to drug-related death.
[Psychiatric aspects of religiousness].
Psychiatric aspects of religiousness have been a rather neglected research area in the near past despite the paradigm change in the religiousness research. This change is manifested in the increase of the number of research studies as well as the great development of research methodology. In this review the authors explore the most important cross points of religiousness and psychiatry with data on mental and physical health, substance use, dimensional characteristics of religiousness, and related factors as well.
[Symptom specificity of adolescents with self-injurious behavior].
As an introductory part of the paper, authors give a short overview of existing results in the literature related to self-injurious behaviour and adolescents' deliberate self-harm. In their own random sample study, authors organized a self-report screen (provincial town, 3 educational facilities, 470 pupils aged between 14 and 18 years) by means of the translated version of Ottawa Self Injury Inventory (OSI) used widely in community-based studies in Canada. The Beck Depression Inventory was introduced to measure the key symptoms of depression among youngsters. 26 youngsters were found to have had at least one self-injurious action in their life-time. The authors describe the characteristics of these subjects on the basis of symptom occurrence statistics. Although the depressive symptoms have an expected correlation with the self-injurious ideas, depression does not seem to have the same relationships with the actual self-harm action. The authors attempt to give an explanation of this contradiction.
Effect of sentence length and complexity on working memory performance in Hungarian children with specific language impairment (SLI): A cross-linguistic comparison.
BACKGROUND: English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. AIMS: To examine the effect of linguistic structure on working memory performance. It was examined whether syntactic complexity has a larger impact on working memory performance than sentence length in Hungarian-speaking children, similar to the findings in English speaking children. METHODS & PROCEDURES: In Experiment 1, performance accuracy was measured with two linguistic span tasks that included stimuli with varying sentence length and syntactic complexity. Experiment 2 examined the impact of sentence length and morphological complexity on working memory performance. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Children with SLI performed more poorly than their age-matched peers in all working memory tasks. Their error patterns differed from those of children with typical language development. Children with SLI produced a high number of interference errors that indicate poor executive functions. The findings were compared with previous results of English-speaking children. Complexity affected working memory performance accuracy differently across languages. In English, it was the increase of syntactic complexity that resulted in a decrease in performance accuracy, whereas in Hungarian, it was the morphological complexity that had a large impact on working memory performance. CONCLUSIONS: Working memory performance depends on the linguistic characteristics of the language tested. In both English- and Hungarian-speaking children, complexity has a larger effect on verbal working memory performance than the length of the stimuli. However, complexity affects working memory performance accuracy differently across languages.
Use of heroin to cope with stress caused by a negative life event in a patient with lupus erythematosus.
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