Biomedical subjects

C Taillefer

Publications and source records attributed to C Taillefer.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

[What is a "left"?].

OBJECTIVE: Patients with right hemisphere syndrome may be labeled as "gauche" by the rehabilitation staff. This term corresponds to a variety of oddities in behavior or discourse. The aim of this study is to understand the coherence of these oddities with the classical elements of right hemisphere syndrome. MATERIAL: In this article, we present a detailed study of the discourse and the relation with others of a patient with severe left hemineglect, who was followed up for twelve months and did not exhibited any significant change in his symptomatology. METHODS: This study relies on the data from neuropsychological examination, on notes written after rehabilitation session by the therapists and on data from weekly non-directive interviews. RESULTS: This follow-up revealed disturbances of time sense, reduplication for places, misidentification of therapists, pseudo hallucinations, and showed that the transferential relation was "floating". The non-directive interviews permitted the patient to express his own interpretation of his troubles. He described them in terms of gaps in his body "carapace" and disorganization of the oral drive. CONCLUSION: We propose to consider the symptomatology of this patient in relation with the subjective effects of the breaking up of his body image and the concomitant intrusion of the oral object (in the psychoanalytic sense of this term) in his psychic reality.

Agnosia↗

PubMed2000

An ecological approach to planning dysfunction: script execution.

Planning, which concerns many activities in everyday life, is a two-stage process. The first one predetermines a course of actions aimed at achieving some specific goals. It is founded on managerial knowledge or overlearned sequences of events and may be tested by script generation. The second stage entails monitoring and guiding the execution of the plan to a successful conclusion. It must take into account environmental contingencies and may be tested by script execution. If the frontal lobes intervene not only in managerial knowledge (Grafman, 1989) but also in binding the plan with contextual environment (Damasio, Tranel and Damasio, 1991; Shallice and Burgess, 1991), script execution would be more sensitive than script generation to planning deficits. To test this hypothesis, script execution and script generation were compared in 11 patients with a dysexecutive syndrome and 10 matched controls, using three scripts of daily life activities: (1) 'shopping for groceries'; (2) 'cooking'; (3) 'answering a letter and finding the way to post the reply'. Two way ANOVAs showed more errors in execution than in generation, more errors in patients than in controls, and a greater difference between execution and generation in patients than in controls. Furthermore, 'context neglect' and 'environmental adherence' were the two types of errors that best differentiated patients from controls. Finally, the total number of errors in execution correlated with the score on behavioral questionnaires answered by occupational therapists. These results confirm our hypothesis and suggest that script execution may be a valid ecological approach to estimate the severity of deficits in daily life activities.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[Bacteriological and clinical aspects of Salmonella typhi infections in the Central African Republic. Evaluation of a 3-year study in Bangui].

Authors have isolated and identified 229 strains from patients with typhoid syndrome . The bacteriology of each strain was studied. We have observed the extension of A (subtype Dakar) lysotype to Central Africa from West Africa. All the strains are resistant for G penicillin. Clinical features are quite the same as in mild countries, with a high incidence in children. The typhoid fever is frequent and precocious in CAR, where prophylaxis by vaccination is not usual.

Adolescent↗