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Biomedical subjects

R W Gråwe

Publications and source records attributed to R W Gråwe.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Neuropsychological impairments in patients with schizophrenia: stability and prediction of outcome.

OBJECTIVE: To assess neuropsychological impairments among fairly young schizophrenic patients over time, and relations between impairment and symptoms, drug type and dose. METHOD: Clinical and neuropsychological data for 29 schizophrenic patients have been published earlier. Twenty of these patients were retested after 3 years using the same methods. RESULTS: The patients displayed stable impairments in most neuropsychological tests. Vocabulary and focused attention improved over time, whereas response slowness became more pronounced. Symptoms varied considerably over time. A specific pattern of neuropsychological impairments, but not measures of psychopathology, predicted clinical outcome. Patients were unable to judge their test performance. CONCLUSION: A few years after the first episode, our patients displayed a specific pattern of neuropsychological impairment, which predicted clinical outcome. One aspect of the impairment appears to be failure at self-monitoring.

Adult↗

Smooth pursuit eye movements and neuropsychological impairments in schizophrenia.

Smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM) and neuropsychological performance were examined in a sample of 29 drug-treated schizophrenic patients and 22 healthy controls. Patients had impairment in SPEM as well as in a wide range of neuropsychological tests (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Finger Tapping, Reaction time, Selective attention, Trail-Making and Simultaneous Capacity). Performance indices were more affected than strategy-executive indices. Drug type (clozapine vs typical) and dose (chlorpromazine units) were not related to neuropsychological impairment among the patients. Indices from the whole range of tests accurately predicted a subjects' group identity (patient vs control). Impaired SPEM was predicted more accurately by tests assessing frontal functions. Seven patients, all men, had only marginal neuropsychological impairments.

Adult↗

Aversive and compensatory classical conditioning with diazepam as conditional stimulus.

The purpose of the first experiment was to investigate whether diazepam could acquire anxiogenic properties by signalling an aversive event. Rats were trained in an operant chamber in the pentylenetetrazol (PTZ) model of anxiety. Thereafter the animals were divided into groups that received classical diazepam conditioning (Group 1), and conditioning of diazepam + tone (Group 2). In the test phase diazepam was injected prior to placement in the operant chamber. Group 2 selected the PTZ-appropriate lever more often than the other groups, indicating that the tone induced anxiety, and diazepam did not. Tones and shock may therefore be more easily associated than diazepam and shock. The second experiment investigated this. Rats were trained the same way as in the first experiment. Thereafter the experimental group received injections of a small dose of diazepam prior to a second injection of a large dose of diazepam. The hypothesis was that a compensatory anxiogenic conditional response to diazepam's anxiolytic effect should be elicited by the small dose. There were no differences between the groups in lever selection, indicating that a compensatory anxiogenic response was not elicited.

Animals↗