Biomedical subjects

Tejinder K Kondel

Publications and source records attributed to Tejinder K Kondel.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Name relearning in elderly patients with schizophrenia: episodic and temporary, not semantic and permanent.

INTRODUCTION: Recent reports of lexical-semantic deficits in patients with schizophrenia (Laws, Al-Uzri, & Mortimer, 2000; Laws, McKenna, & Kondel, 1998) suggest that younger patients have problems accessing intact memories and older patients show apparent "loss" of the lexical-semantic memory representations themselves. METHODS: Picture naming for everyday items was examined in a unique series of elderly patients with schizophrenia (n = 10) with a mean illness duration of 45.5 years; and compared with that in patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (n = 18) and elderly healthy controls (n = 27). Naming consistency across time was used as an indicator of whether the schizophrenic patients had difficulty accessing representations or a loss of the representations themselves. Finally, we examined the ability of the schizophrenic patients to relearn the names of unnamed items across four weekly retraining sessions and to retain them at a one month follow-up. RESULTS: The elderly schizophrenic patients were as anomic as patients with probable Alzheimer's disease. Consistency analysis revealed that the patients had storage deficits. Analysis of patient error types was consistent with a semantic deficit. Finally, the schizophrenic patients showed significant improvement with relearning, but this was not maintained at follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: Elderly patients with schizophrenia show a profound and stable anomia. Although name relearning induced some significant gains in naming, these were short-term and reflect episodic rather than semantic reinstatement of representations. Implications for cognitive remediation are discussed.

Aged↗

PubMed2005

What happens to semantic memory when formal thought disorder remits? Revisiting a case study.

INTRODUCTION: Laws, Kondel, and McKenna (1999) previously reported a case study analysis of a schizophrenic patient (TC) with severe formal thought disorder (FTD). Examining consistency across item and modality of input, Laws et al. documented an impairment of access to semantic knowledge in TC. METHOD: Following substantial improvement in his FTD, we readministered the same extensive battery of neuropsychological tests tapping semantic memory functioning. RESULTS: Whilst TC's naming remained relatively good, it also became more consistent across both time and modality. Tasks tapping language comprehension and understanding of semantic association revealed some significant improvements. Nevertheless, TC showed a residual propensity to verify false information. CONCLUSION: Improvement in FTD in schizophrenia was accompanied by a better and more stable semantic memory performance in TC. The findings are consistent with, and expand upon the original suggestion that thought disorder reflects disorganised access to semantic memory.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

Intellectual differences between schizophrenic patients and normal controls across the adult lifespan.

A debate persists about whether IQ declines during the duration of schizophrenia or whether an early deficit remains static across the lifespan. To examine this, we measured estimated current IQ (Quick Test Revised: QTR) and estimated premorbid IQ (National Adult Reading Test: NART) in schizophrenic patients (n=110) and matched healthy controls (n=71) across a wide age range (20-88). Age correlated negatively with NART and QTR IQ for schizophrenic patients, but not for controls. A subset of 23 schizophrenic patients was also retested on the NART after 4 years to determine NART stability and they showed no significant change. We propose that the lower NART IQ in older patients reflects a lower 'starting point' and that this may be related to lower educational opportunities in older patients.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Prospective memory and executive function in schizophrenia.

Experimental studies of normal subjects have shown that the intention to perform an action speeds word recognition for items related to that intention (Goschke & Kuhl, 1993). This phenomenon--the intention superiority effect (ISE)--is thought to be mediated by frontal executive functions. Since schizophrenia is characteristically associated with forms of frontal-executive dysfunction, an impaired ISE might be expected in this patient group. A script-learning paradigm was used to investigate the ISE in 10 schizophrenics who do show evidence of executive dysfunction and in 10 who do not. As predicted, only the former showed an ISE; however, all schizophrenics showed an ISE to words semantically related to the intention. It seems that the ability to form specific intentions is impaired only in schizophrenics with executive dysfunction; however, they retain the ability to form more generalized intentions.

Adult↗