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Biomedical subjects

Jack Gorman

Publications and source records attributed to Jack Gorman.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Diffusion tensor imaging in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Alignment of white matter axons as inferred from diffusion tensor imaging has indicated changes in schizophrenia in frontal and frontotemporal white matter. METHODS: Diffusion tensor anisotropy and anatomical magnetic resonance images were acquired in 64 patients with schizophrenia and 55 normal volunteers. Anatomical images were acquired with a magnetization prepared rapid gradient echo sequence, and diffusion tensor images used a pulsed gradient spin-echo acquisition. Images were aligned and warped to a standard brain, and anisotropy in normal volunteers and patients was compared using significance probability mapping. RESULTS: Patients showed widespread areas of reduced anisotropy, including the frontal white matter, the corpus callosum, and the frontal longitudinal fasciculus. CONCLUSIONS: These findings, which are consistent with earlier reports of frontal decreases in anisotropy, demonstrate that the effects are most prominent in frontal and callosal areas and are particularly widespread in frontal white matter regions.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Increased brainstem volume in panic disorder: a voxel-based morphometric study.

Neurocircuitry models of panic disorder have hypothesized that the panic attack itself stems from loci in the brainstem including the ascending reticular system and respiratory and cardiovascular control centers. Voxel-based morphometry with acobian modulation was used to examine gray matter volume changes in 10 panic disorder patients and 23 healthy controls. The panic disorder patients had a relatively increased gray matter volume in the midbrain and rostral pons of the brainstem. Increased ventral hippocampal and decreased regional prefrontal cortex volumes were also noted at a lower significance threshold. This finding has implications for pathophysiologic models of panic disorder, and provides structural evidence for the role of the brainstem in neurocircuitry models of panic disorder.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Fear-related activity in subgenual anterior cingulate differs between men and women.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging in association with an instructed fear/anticipatory anxiety paradigm was used to explore sex differences in the human fear response. During anticipation of mild electrodermal stimulation, women, as compared with men, demonstrated increased activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and functionally related regions of the insula and brainstem. The subgenual anterior cingulate cortex is a region critical for emotional control implicated in the pathogenesis of psychiatric disease. Present findings suggest a contributory neural substrate for the greater susceptibility of women to anxiety and affective disorders, and emphasize the importance of considering participant sex when designing and interpreting functional neuroimaging studies.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Differential time courses and specificity of amygdala activity in posttraumatic stress disorder subjects and normal control subjects.

BACKGROUND: Previous neuroimaging studies have demonstrated exaggerated amygdala responses to negative stimuli in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The time course of this amygdala response is largely unstudied and is relevant to questions of habituation and sensitization in PTSD exposure therapy. METHODS: We applied blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging and statistical parametric mapping to study amygdala responses to trauma-related and nontrauma-related emotional words in sexual/physical abuse PTSD and normal control subjects. We examined the time course of this response by separate analysis of early and late epochs. RESULTS: PTSD versus normal control subjects have a relatively increased initial amygdala response to trauma-related negative, but not nontrauma-related negative, versus neutral stimuli. Patients also fail to show the normal patterns of sensitization and habituation to different categories of negative stimuli. These findings correlate with measured PTSD symptom severity. CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate differential time courses and specificity of amygdala response to emotional and control stimuli in PTSD and normal control subjects. This has implications for pathophysiologic models of PTSD and treatment response. The results also extend previous neuroimaging studies demonstrating relatively increased amygdala response in PTSD and expand these results to a largely female patient population probed with emotionally valenced words.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Doxapram-induced panic attacks and cortisol elevation.

Numerous agents with differing biological properties and central nervous system (CNS) effects can induce panic attacks in predisposed individuals. A potential explanation of this finding is that panic disorder patients are more likely to panic than normal control subjects when given a panicogen due to an excessive fear response to somatic arousal. We test this hypothesis by using doxapram, a panicogen with minimal CNS effects, to induce panic in patients and control subjects. Doxapram was given to six subjects with panic disorder with or without agoraphobia and four healthy volunteers. Measures comprised the Acute Panic Inventory, the Borg Exertion scale, the 10-point Anxiety Scale, the 10-point Apprehension Scale, cortisol, prolactin, and MHPG, all obtained at baseline and multiple time points after the doxapram infusion. All panic disorder patients panicked with doxapram, whereas no control subjects had a panic attack. Panic patients had similar levels of breathlessness with doxapram compared with control subjects. Although panic patients had higher levels of anxiety and apprehension, these did not change significantly with doxapram compared with control levels. Doxapram led to similar increases in cortisol and prolactin in both groups, and MHPG was consistently elevated in panic patients, but unaffected by doxapram. These results show that doxapram is a useful panicogen in the study of panic disorder. Since the panic patients and control subjects had similar levels of physiological and psychological arousal, but the panic patients were more likely to have a panic attack, this lends support to the concept of a sensitized fear network in panic disorder patients.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Psychopharmacological possibilities in the acute disaster setting.

This article focuses on possible psychopharmacological interventions in the immediate post disaster setting. As there is little evidence for the efficacy or effectiveness of such interventions-given the difficulty in performing randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled studies with these populations-the article will delineate the neurobiological basis for pathological sequelae and theoretical drug interventions targeting putative disease mechanisms.

Acute Disease↗
PubMed2002

Paternal age and sporadic schizophrenia: evidence for de novo mutations.

Schizophrenia is an etiologically heterogeneous syndrome. It has a strong genetic component and exists in clinically indistinguishable familial and nonfamilial (sporadic) forms. A significant role for de novo genetic mutations in genetic schizophrenia vulnerability is suggested by a strong monotonic increase in schizophrenia risk with advancing paternal age. However, an alternative explanation for the paternal age effect in schizophrenia is that childbearing is delayed in fathers who themselves have genetic schizophrenia vulnerability. In this study, we compared paternal birth ages between patient groups with familial (n = 35) and sporadic (n = 68) patients with DSM-IV schizophrenia from an inpatient schizophrenia research unit. If later age of fathering children is related to having some genetic schizophrenia vulnerability, then paternal birth age should be later in familial schizophrenia cases than in sporadic cases, and any association of father's age and schizophrenia risk in offspring would be a spurious finding, unrelated to etiology. However, if de novo mutations cause sporadic schizophrenia, then patients without a family history of schizophrenia would have older fathers than familial patients. We found that patients without a family history of schizophrenia had significantly older fathers (4.7 years) than familial patients; so later childbirth was not attributable to parental psychiatric illness. These findings support the hypothesis that de novo mutations contribute to the risk for sporadic schizophrenia.

Age Factors↗