Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to J Cutting.
A retrospective study of alcoholic psychoses is reported. The phenomena of the illnesses corresponded poorly with classical descriptions of alcoholic hallucinosis, delirium tremens and alcoholic paranoia. Alternative diagnostic approaches were tried (Catego, restrictive definition of alcoholic hallucinosis). The problems of distinguishing psychoses with associated organic factors from 'idiopathic' forms are discussed.
Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome, dementia, alcoholism, right and left temporal lobectomy, and normal subjects were compared on verbal learning and picture recognition memory tasks. Alcoholics and right lobectomy patients were similar on all measures, but the other groups had a characteristic pattern, particularly on hit and false positive rates in picture recognition.
Anosognosia (denial of weakness) and "anosognosic phenomena" (other abnormal attitudes to a weak limb) were studied in 100 acute hemiplegics. Both conditions were associated with lesions of either hemisphere. Apathy, visual field defect, and impaired picture identification were particularly prominent in anosognosia. A failure to integrate information from one side of the body was regarded as fundamental to the condition; explanations in terms of "unilateral neglect" and "agnosia" are discussed.
Forty alcoholics and 40 controls were compared on tests of frontal lobe functions, abstracting ability, and verbal and picture memory. Alcoholics were inferior to controls, and heavy drinkers poorer than moderate ones (life-time alcohol consumption) on picture memory and a verbal fluency test of frontal lobe functions. Verbal memory and abstracting ability were not significantly impaired. Although this pattern may indicate that frontal and right temporal areas of the brain are particularly vulnerable to the effects of chronic alcoholism, the possibility that it may merely reflect general sensitivity of the tests to brain damage cannot be ruled out.