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Biomedical subjects

M E Strauss

Publications and source records attributed to M E Strauss.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Personality changes in Alzheimer's disease.

How personality changes in Alzheimer's disease is not well understood. Accentuations of premorbid personality, systematic shifts in personality traits, and specific personality changes affecting subtypes of patients have been postulated. To investigate which of these alternatives occurs in Alzheimer's disease, caregivers were given a comprehensive personality inventory standardized for use by informants. Caregivers observed more neurotic, less extroverted, and less conscientious behavior. To a smaller extent, patients with Alzheimer's disease were reported as becoming less agreeable and less open. The changes in reports of neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and openness suggested consistent systematic shifts across all patients. Patients with depressive features were reported to have been more neurotic; those with paranoid delusions were reported as having been more hostile. Premorbid personality traits may predispose to subsequent psychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer's disease.

Aged↗
PubMed1992

Visual information decoding deficits in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenic and control subjects were tested on two-flash fusion (TFF) and visual backward masking (VBM) tasks in a repeated measures design. Each subject was tested in a single session. Both tasks used the same equipment and stimuli. There was no difference between the groups in their ability to detect the presence of two separate stimuli in the TFF task. Schizophrenic subjects did require longer interstimulus intervals (ISI) than control subjects to accurately report one of the two targets in the VBM task. Analysis of individual targets reveals that the VBM deficit is a function of the similarity of the target and mask. The more feature detail discrimination necessary, the longer an ISI is required in VBM. The data are interpreted as supporting the conclusion that since the groups did not differ in their performance of the TFF task, which would also have been affected by a sensory abnormality, the deficit in VBM must be explained by reference to a higher level of information processing. The VBM deficit is a failure to decode the target stimulus, and is not simply a function of abnormalities due to an overactive transient channel system.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Disengagement of attention in chronic schizophrenia.

Posner et al. (1988) recently found a lateralized impairment in the shift of covert visual attention to the right visual field in acute schizophrenic patients. Strauss et al. (1991) did not find this lateralized attentional deficit in remitted neuroleptic-treated chronic schizophrenic outpatients. The present study examined the covert shifting of visuospatial attention in clinically ill inpatients with chronic schizophrenia and in nonpsychotic control subjects. Although patients with schizophrenia were slower in all conditions, no lateralized attentional abnormalities were found. Taken together, these studies suggest that neuroleptic treatment may affect a lateralized attentional impairment in chronic schizophrenia.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Personal and extrapersonal orientation in Huntington's disease patients and those at risk.

Two aspects of spatial cognition, personal and extrapersonal orientation, were studied in 21 patients with Huntington's disease, 49 individuals at risk for the disease, and 41 healthy control subjects. Personal orientation was assessed using the Standardized Road Map Test of Directional Sense. Extrapersonal orientation was measured using a route-walking task under two conditions--with and without turning the body while traversing the routes. Relative to normal controls, HD patients performed more slowly on the personal orientation test, and less accurately on the extrapersonal orientation task in the TURN, but not the NO-TURN condition. At-risk individuals performed like the normal control subjects on all measures. The results suggest a deficit in personal but not extrapersonal orientation in HD. It is suggested that disruption of fronto-striatal pathways mediates this deficit.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Disengagement of attention in schizophrenia.

We compared covert shift of visual attention in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, both in states of remission, to normal controls to examine the persistence of lateralized attentional deficits into nonpsychotic states. Although patients were slower in all conditions than normals, there was no difference in pattern of attentional shift among the groups. This suggests that the left-hemisphere deficit in shift of covert attention in schizophrenia may be limited to periods of florid illness.

Attention↗
PubMed1991

Reduction of perseverative errors in patients with schizophrenia using monetary feedback.

The influence of monetary feedback on Wisconsin Card Sort Test (WCST) performance of 14 male schizophrenics was investigated. Patients were administered the test under standard instructions and with monetary feedback in counterbalanced order. Monetary reinforcement reduced perseverative errors and increased correct responses (p less than .05). These findings suggest that the WCST perseverative errors of schizophrenics reflect motivational as well as cognitive factors.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Are there neuropsychologic manifestations of the gene for Huntington's disease in asymptomatic, at-risk individuals?

It has recently been reported that persons at risk for Huntington's disease who test positive for the linked restriction fragment length polymorphism on chromosome 4 display neuropsychologic impairments when compared with at-risk subjects who test negative for this marker. We have studied a substantially larger series of at-risk subjects who have been thoroughly screened for the absence of neurologic or psychiatric features of Huntington's disease and have undergone predictive DNA testing. No evidence of cognitive or emotional differences between marker-positive and marker-negative individuals was found. Consideration of the designs and findings of the two studies indicates that it is premature to conclude that there are neuropsychologic impairments in Huntington's disease that precede the clinical onset of the illness.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Clonazepam treatment of tardive dyskinesia: a practical GABAmimetic strategy.

Because of the efficacy of specific gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) agonists in tardive dyskinesia, the authors tested the benzodiazepine clonazepam in a 12-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized crossover trial in 19 chronically ill patients with tardive dyskinesia who were being treated with neuroleptics. They found a 35% decrease in dyskinesia ratings with clonazepam treatment. The six patients with predominantly dystonic symptoms showed greater benefit than the 13 patients with predominantly choreoathetoid dyskinesias. Tolerance developed to the antidyskinetic effect of clonazepam in the five patients whose long-term use of the drug was followed, but a 2-week clonazepam-free period recaptured its antidyskinetic effect.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

D2 receptors in Huntington's disease: positron emission tomography findings and clinical correlates.

The relationship of dopamine receptor binding in the caudate nucleus and the putamen to neurological and neuropsychological functioning was examined in 21 patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and eight individuals at risk of developing Huntington's disease. A significant reduction in relative binding of [11C]3-N-methylspiperone to the dopamine receptor was found in both the caudate and putamen of HD patients. Binding in the caudate was correlated only with tests of rapid coding and set alternation, while binding in the putamen was correlated only with duration of illness. The findings indicate that the well-described atrophic changes in the striatum of Huntington's disease patients are accompanied by receptor alterations. They also support previous animal and human studies indicating that the caudate nucleus plays a larger role in cognition than in motor functions.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Rating affective flattening from videotaped interviews.

Semistructured interviews with 28 schizophrenic patients were videotaped. The affective flattening section of the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) was rated after each interview. At a later date, each videotape was rated by three raters as well as the interviewer. Reliability was estimated within and across rating conditions by intraclass correlation. Comparison of reliability scores across rating conditions indicated that the videotape medium had little effect on the ability of raters to rate affective flattening similarly.

Humans↗
PubMed1989

Relation of neuroleptic and anticholinergic medication to cognitive functions in schizophrenia.

In this article, we review research designed to examine the influence of neuroleptic and anticholinergic drugs on cognitive processes in schizophrenia. The review is motivated by the recognition that pharmacotherapy is an important factor in psychological research on schizophrenia, given that the great majority of patients studied in investigations of cognition receive both of these drugs. We find that neuroleptic treatment is associated with limited normalization on many psychological measures, whereas anticholinergics appear to disrupt some aspects of memory. Subject selection criteria, research designs, and drug measurement methods important in the evaluation of possible drug effects in psychological studies are discussed.

Antipsychotic Agents↗
PubMed1988

The embedded set procedure. Comment on Galbraith, MacCrimmon, and Steffy.

The reaction-time crossover phenomenon discovered by Rodnick and Shakow has come to be studied mainly with the embedded isotemporal sets procedure and indexed by the difference in reaction time to regular and irregular trials at a 7-second preparatory interval (PI). A 1983 report in this journal by Galbraith et al. (J Nerv Ment Dis 171:670-675) demonstrated that the magnitude of crossover at this PI was influenced by the duration of the preparatory interval immediately prior (PPI) to the first trial of the 7-second isotemporal blocks. Secondary analyses reported here extend the examination of PPI influences and indicate: a) that the crossover phenomenon as assessed in the embedded sets procedure is due mainly to the very slow reaction time to the first trial of the 1-second isotemporal blocks; and b) that crossover in this paradigm is partially due to uncontrolled PPI influences across the 1-, 3-, and 7-second embedded blocks. These are further reasons for returning to the original Rodnick-Shakow method as Galbraith et al. recommended.

Attention↗
PubMed1987

Olfactory recognition: differential impairments in early and late Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases.

Forty-two patients with senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT), 38 patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and matched normal controls were administered tests of olfactory, verbal, and visual recognition after being screened for normal olfactory discrimination. Early-affected Huntington's patients (EHD) with minimal chorea or cognitive deficit displayed marked deficits in olfactory recognition despite normal verbal and visual performance, even after correction for task difficulty, suggesting involvement of olfactory brain regions early in the disease process. In the early Alzheimer's group (EAD), marked deficits were seen on all recognition modalities indicating more global impairment. Both overall (early plus late) patient groups were impaired relative to controls on all recognition tasks, with the olfactory paradigm being most affected.

Alzheimer Disease↗
PubMed1987

Span of apprehension deficits in schizophrenia and mania.

Reduced perceptual span has been suggested to be a cognitive marker of vulnerability to schizophrenia. However, the specificity of this impairment in visual information processing to schizophrenia is not well established. This preliminary study examined perceptual span in schizophrenic and manic patients divided into subgroups with and without active symptomatology. Symptomatic patients had reduced span in comparison with less symptomatic groups, but there were no differences between schizophrenic and manic patients.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

Test-retest reliability of information-processing measures among chronic schizophrenics.

Evidence of task reliability is critical for use of measures of attention in studies of individual differences among members of clinical populations. Test-retest reliability of several measures of attention and information processing was studied in 14 chronic schizophrenics. Performance was stable over a 6-month period, except for decreases in reaction time.

Adult↗