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Biomedical subjects

D F Benson

Publications and source records attributed to D F Benson.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed1988

Posterior cortical atrophy.

Five patients had progressive dementia heralded by disorders of higher visual function. All eventually developed alexia, agraphia, visual agnosia, and components of Balint's, Gerstmann's, and transcortical sensory aphasia syndromes. Memory, insight, and judgment were relatively preserved until late in the course. Predominant parieto-occipital atrophy was demonstrated on both computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging in two of the patients; posterior circulation was normal by angiography in the three studied. To date, no pathologic specimen is available for study; speculations on the underlying pathologic condition include an atypical clinical variant of Alzheimer's disease, a lobar atrophy analogous to Pick's disease, or some previously unrecognized entity.

Aged↗
PubMed1988

A characterization of the prosodic loss in Parkinson's disease.

Prosodic contours in the verbal output of 30 patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's disease were contrasted to those of fifteen age-, sex-, and educationally matched normal subjects. All subjects were tested for language disorder, dementia, depression, and the comprehension of linguistic prosody. The striking disorder of prosody in Parkinson's disease relates to motor control, not to a loss of the linguistic knowledge required to make prosodic distinctions. It appears that prosody, language and the motor planning of speech are integrated at a basal ganglia level.

Aged↗
PubMed1988

Psychological dysfunction accompanying subcortical dementias.

Subcortical dementia occurs both in disorders affecting the basal ganglia (for example, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and progressive supranuclear palsy) and in a variety of subcortical vascular, infectious, inflammatory, neoplastic, and traumatic conditions. The principal features of subcortical dementia include bradyphrenia, impairment of executive function, recall abnormalities, visuospatial disturbances, depression, and apathy. The syndrome contrasts with dementia of the Alzheimer type in which cortical involvement produces aphasia, combined recall and recognition deficits, and indifference. Electrophysiologic, biochemical, and metabolic studies support a distinction between subcortical and cortical dementias.

Affective Disorders, Psychotic↗
PubMed1988

Idiopathic basal ganglia calcification and organic mood disorder.

Idiopathic basal ganglia calcification is a syndrome consisting of bilateral basal ganglia calcifications, neuropsychiatric abnormalities, disturbances of movement, and normal calcium and phosphorus metabolism. The best described neuropsychiatric alterations are dementia and an organic psychosis. Organic mood disorder has been reported less often, and mania secondary to idiopathic basal ganglia calcification has not been noted previously. The authors describe five patients with idiopathic basal ganglia calcification and organic mood changes, including one patient with secondary mania. Symptoms of idiopathic basal ganglia calcification resemble those of other disorders affecting subcortical structures and support an association between mood, affect, cognition, and the extrapyramidal nuclear system. Treatment may ameliorate the mood disorder.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease: comparison of speech and language alterations.

Speech and language alterations were assessed in 51 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 10 patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). Thirty-five of the PD patients had no evidence of intellectual impairment on a conventional mental status questionnaire and 16 of the PD patients had dementia syndromes of comparable severity to the DAT patients. DAT produced significantly greater language disturbances, including anomia, decreased information content of spontaneous speech, and diminished word list generation. PD patients had significantly decreased phrase length, impaired speech melody, dysarthria, and agraphia. The results suggest that the dementia of PD is distinguishable from that of DAT:PD patients have prominent motor speech abnormalities, whereas DAT patients exhibit more profound language alterations.

Aged↗
PubMed1988

Speech and language alterations in multi-infarct dementia.

Speech and language functions were assessed in 18 patients with multi-infarct dementia (MID) and 14 with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). The age range and dementia severity of the two groups were comparable. We used a speech and language battery assessing 37 elements of verbal output to characterize alterations in the patients. MID patients had more abnormalities of motor aspects of speech, whereas DAT patients had empty speech, more marked anomia, and relative sparing of motor speech functions. The results demonstrate that speech and language differ in MID and DAT. In addition, MID patients exhibited common clinical features despite the heterogeneity of the syndrome.

Aged↗
PubMed1987

The role of the nucleus basalis of Meynert in dementia: review and reconsideration.

The nucleus basalis of Meynert (nbM), a cholinergic nuclear group located in the sublenticular region, receives afferent input principally from the limbic system and projects to most of the cerebral cortex. The nucleus is atrophic in dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) and several other dementing disorders and attempts have been made to relate cholinergic deficits as well as intellectual impairment to nbM alterations. A cortical cholinergic deficit is routinely associated with atrophy of nbM, but there is no consistent relationship between changes in nbM and histopathologic alterations of the Alzheimer type and a variable association between nbM changes and dementia. The available information suggests that atrophy of nbM and cortical cholinergic deficits have a contributory role in several dementia syndromes but cannot account for many pathologic and behavioral aspects of these disorders.

Acetylcholine↗
PubMed1987

Transcortical sensory aphasia in China.

Three cases of transcortical sensory aphasia in Chinese speakers were associated with left parieto-temporal junction strokes. The possibility that this relatively rare aphasia syndrome is more common in the Chinese is raised and a theoretical explanation based on differences in Oriental written language is presented.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1987

Treatable dementias.

Dementia is an acquired impairment of intellect produced by brain dysfunction. In the past, dementia was regarded as inevitably chronic, progressive and irreversible. More recently dementia has been viewed as a clinical syndrome that may be produced by both irreversible and reversible conditions. Recognition of the presence of a dementia syndrome should be followed by an evaluation for potentially treatable causes of the intellectual deterioration. Dementia treatment includes therapy for reversible or curable dementias and nonspecific interventions that may improve the condition of patients with progressive dementia syndromes.

Alzheimer Disease↗
PubMed1986

Abnormal erythrocyte choline and influx in Alzheimer's disease.

Choline transport and levels were studied in erythrocytes from patients with Alzheimer's disease and age-matched controls using stable isotopic tracer techniques. The mean erythrocyte choline in the Alzheimer group was 50.1 nmol ml-1 compared to 15.5 nmol ml-1 in the controls. This was significant using a Student's t test at a P of less than 0.0005. Influx of choline into the erythrocyte correlated inversely with erythrocyte choline with high significance. This study suggests that erythrocyte choline is elevated in a subset of patients with Alzheimer's disease and that the low affinity transport system is also abnormal in these patients. This abnormality of choline transport may play a role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease in some patients.

Aged↗
PubMed1986

Loss of topographic familiarity. An environmental agnosia.

Sixteen patients manifested the syndrome of loss of environmental familiarity. The syndrome is characterized by an inability to recognize familiar surroundings in spite of relatively intact verbal memory, cognition, and perception. In addition to the loss of environmental familiarity, other clinical disturbances, including central achromatopsia, prosopagnosia, palinopsia, visual hallucinations, dressing disturbances, or impaired revisualization, were present in several cases. Radiologic studies revealed that all patients had right medial temporo-occipital lesions; three had additional left-sided lesions. Clinical observations suggest that the syndrome is a class-specific agnosia similar to prosopagnosia.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Dual personality associated with epilepsy.

Two individuals with well-defined seizure problems developed dual personalities. One personality was irritable and hostile, the other placid; in each case, a major seizure preceded the shift from the former to the latter. Each personality was amnesic for the other. The incidence of seizures in patients with multiple personality disorder is higher than expected, and these cases demonstrate a direct relationship.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Depression in epilepsy. Significance and phenomenology.

Depression is common in epileptics, but few studies of this relationship exist. We investigated the prevalence of depression in comparably disabled outpatients and its phenomenology in psychiatrically hospitalized inpatients. Fifty-five percent of 175 outpatient epileptics and 30% of 70 matched controls reported depression; 30% of epileptics vs 7% of controls reported prior suicide attempts. Epileptics were four times more likely to have been hospitalized for depression than nonepileptics. Twenty depressed epileptic inpatients were characterized by "endogenous" rather than "neurotic" features with more psychotic traits, paranoia, and underlying chronic dysthymia. Sixteen patients had complex partial seizures, and ten of 11 patients had a lateralized electroencephalographic focus lateralized to the left hemisphere. These results suggest a specific epileptic psychosyndrome due to limbic dysfunction.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Language functioning after bilateral prefrontal leukotomy.

Three groups of patients with orbital frontal lesions secondary to leukotomy were compared to psychiatric and normal control groups on a series of tasks involving language. The results indicated that chronic orbital frontal lesions, at least in the patients in this study, do not affect language as defined by the tasks used in the study. The frontal lobes, when implicated in language, appear to require dorsal-lateral or medial cortical involvement.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1986

The validity of hysterical signs and symptoms.

In an attempt to validate recent assertions that the strongest indicators of hysteria are the "positive" findings in the neurological examination, seven of the most accepted features (history of hypochondriasis, secondary gain, la belle indifference, nonanatomical sensory loss, split of midline by pain or vibratory stimulation, changing boundaries of hypalgesia, giveaway weakness) were sought in 30 consecutive neurology service admissions with acute structural nervous system damage. All subjects showed at least one of these findings; most presented three or four. The presence of these "positive" findings of hysteria in patients with acute structural brain disease invalidates their use as pathognomonic evidence of hysteria. A second, retrospective study on the misdiagnosis of hysteria demonstrated that women, homosexual men, the psychiatrically ill, and patients presenting plausible psychogenic explanations for their illness are most liable to be misdiagnosed. Certain disorders, particularly movement disorders and paralysis, are most often mislabeled as hysteria. A diagnosis of hysteria must be made with great caution as it so often proves incorrect.

Acute Disease↗