Biomedical subjects
M Göpfert
Publications and source records attributed to M Göpfert.
A comparative psychiatric assessment of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and muscle disease.
The psychiatric status of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (N = 34) and muscle disease (N = 24) attending a general medical clinic was studied. Among fatigue patients 14 (41.2%) were cases and a further 9 (26.5%) were subcases of psychiatric disorder as defined by CATEGO. A variety of diagnoses was found. Significantly fewer of the muscle patients had a psychiatric disorder with 3 (12.5%) being cases and 1 (4%) a subcase. The relative risk of psychiatric disorder in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome compared to patients with muscle disease was 3.3:1.
Perceptual discrimination of vowels in aphasia.
In the present study 3 hypotheses were investigated: first, the notion that an aphasic impairment of vowel perception is not associated with particular aphasic syndromes or lesion sites, second, that it is a disorder comparable to a general impairment of perception in a normal speaker caused by some form of interference, and third, that perceptual phonemic discrimination is a separate process from the phonemic discriminative function necessary for speech production. The hypotheses were tested by means of a vowel discrimination test administered to 50 German-speaking aphasic patients (roughly equally divided between Broca's, mixed non-fluent, Wernicke's and mixed fluent groups); the same test, masked by white noise at -10 dB was also administered to 20 normal native speakers of German. Results were in support of all 3 hypotheses. First, aphasic patients' error patterns were similar across fluent and nonfluent groups and for all lesion sites. Second, the error distributions of aphasics with slight auditory impairment resembled those of normal subjects in the -10 dB white noise condition, while distributions of aphasics with severe auditory impairment were indicative of an added component of guessing behaviour. And third, the patients' performance on the discrimination task differed from that shown on a comparable repetition test. (It was argued that repetition involves a patient's expressive capacity in addition to his perceptual capacity). The differentiation of perceptual and expressive phonemic discrimination was further supported by an analysis of the speech errors occurring in the spontaneous (purely expressive) speech and in the repetition (expressive plus perceptual) tasks of 16 French Canadian and 5 English Canadian aphasics.
[Dichotic hearing test in 750 German school-children (author's transl)].
Dichotic tests, according to Feldmann 1965, were carried out within a main highschool of Munich (W.-Germany). Over 750 school-children ranging from 6-17 years in age were tested in pure tone audiometry and dichotic Feldmann test. The result showed a poor reproduction of words in the dichotic test in age groups under 10 years. The conclusion seems to be that the single words of this dichotic test are 1. too difficult, 2. without real meaning, 3. hard to grasp or 4. without worthy motivation in these children. A new test for children is required to cope with the difficulties of speech assessment in young school-children.