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Biomedical subjects

N Butters

Publications and source records attributed to N Butters.

191 records · Page 11Linked to original sources
PubMedDate not supplied

Verbal memory deficits associated with major affective disorders: a comparison of unipolar and bipolar patients.

The verbal learning and fluency of patients with unipolar and bipolar depression were compared to those of normal controls and patients with Huntington's disease. The data demonstrated that the recall and recognition performance of both groups of depressed patients were impaired relative to the performance of normal control subjects. The bipolar patients, however, were more impaired than the unipolar patients on both tasks (P less than 0.024 and P less than 0.022, respectively). In addition, the unipolar patients generated more correct responses on a test of verbal fluency (P less than 0.04). The performance of the bipolar patients was, in fact, similar to that of patients with Huntington's disease, a progressive degenerative disorder that primarily affects subcortical areas.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Affective/motivational factors in the recall of prose passages by alcoholic Korsakoff patients.

The present study assessed the role of motivational/affective factors in the recall of short stories by alcoholic Korsakoff patients. On both immediate and delayed recall, the Korsakoff patients remembered proportionately more of stories with a sexual theme than of passages which were neutral or aggressive in content. In contrast to the Korsakoff patients, the emotional theme of the story had no effect upon the recall performance of alcoholic (non-Korsakoff) and normal control subjects. While the two control groups evidenced no forgetting of textual material between immediate and delayed recall, the alcoholic Korsakoff patients showed a rapid and equivalent rate of forgetting of all three story types. These findings suggest that while motivational/affective factors may influence the alcoholic Korsakoff patients' selective attention and immediate recall, they have little or no influence upon the patients' inability to retain verbal information. The importance of this conclusion for encoding theories of amnesia is discussed.

Affect↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Computerized measures of CT scans of alcoholics: thalamic region related to memory.

CT scans of 24 chronic alcoholics were analyzed by computer. Measures of thalamic CT density numbers and third ventricle/intracranial width ratio, as well as supraventricular measures of frontal and parietal CT density numbers, sulcal fluid area, and sulcal fluid volume, were obtained. Tests of long- and short-term memory and visuoperceptive functions were also administered. Results showed that alcoholics' long-term (but not short-term) memory performance correlates significantly with thalamic CT density numbers in the region of the dorsomedial nucleus and with third ventricle/intracranial width ratio, but not with supraventricular CT measures. These findings support the conclusions that (1) the midline thalamic region is involved in the mediation of long-term memory; (2) long- and short-term memory are separable on an anatomical as well as psychological basis; (3) there is a continuum of cognitive impairment encompassing alcoholic Korsakoff patients at one end of the spectrum and alcohol abusers at the other end and (4) computerized CT scan measures, including CT density numbers, contribute significantly to alcoholic CT research methodology.

Alcoholism↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Memory for temporal order and frequency of occurrence in detoxified alcoholics.

The ability to retain temporal order (recency) and event frequency information was assessed in long-term alcoholics and in nonalcoholic control subjects. On the temporal recency task, the alcoholics were impaired when they were asked unexpectedly to judge how recently these stimuli had been presented. When subjects were aware that they would eventually be asked to make decisions about temporal order, the alcoholics evidenced significant difficulties only for the figural stimuli. On the task requiring judgements about the frequency of events, alcoholics demonstrated significant deficits only when they had to make unexpected judgements about figural stimuli. The implications of these findings for the neurological basis of alcoholics' cognitive deficits are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Assessment of olfactory deficits in detoxified alcoholics.

Olfactory functioning was evaluated in 37 male detoxified alcoholics and in 21 age-matched nonalcoholic controls using the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT). Of the original subjects, 23 alcoholics and 14 controls returned for reevaluation 3-4 months following initial testing. The results showed that alcoholics had significantly lower UPSIT scores than did the controls, both at baseline and follow-up testing. Thirty-two percent of the alcoholics' UPSIT scores, in comparison to five percent of the controls' scores, fell into the clinically impaired range. Although current smoking patterns correlated significantly with UPSIT indices, comparisons limited to nonsmokers still indicated that the alcoholics were significantly impaired on this olfactory task. Correlational analyses indicated that olfactory performance was unrelated to alcoholics' scores on visuoconceptual and language tasks. Correlations with MR-derived indices of CSF volume showed a highly significant relationship between UPSIT scores and cortical sulcal volumes. Additionally, alcoholics (N = 15) who remained abstinent had significantly higher scores at follow-up than those who were not abstinent (N = 8). These findings demonstrate that alcoholism is associated with basic olfactory impairments which are only partially reversible with abstinence and that cortical structures play an important role in this sensory loss.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Olfactory loss in alcoholics: correlations with cortical and subcortical MRI indices.

The relationship between olfactory identification ability and MRI volumetric indices of specific cortical and subcortical brain regions was investigated in 36 recently detoxified male alcoholics. The results of correlational analyses between MRI indices and score on the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT) revealed that impairment in olfactory identification was associated with elevated cortical and ventricular CSF volumes as well as with reduced tissue volumes in the cortical and subcortical grey matter. The volume of the thalamus was found to be a significant unique predictor of UPSIT score, even after accounting for variance shared with other MRI indices. These findings provide the first empirical support for existing hypotheses that olfactory loss in alcoholic subjects may be mediated by both cortical and subcortical structures.

Alcoholism↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Retrograde amnesia in patients with Alzheimer's disease or Huntington's disease.

Retrograde amnesia (RA) was studied in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) or Alzheimer's disease (AD) using an updated version of the remote memory battery originally developed by Albert, Butters and Levin. Regardless of whether remote memory was measured by unaided recall or cued recall, HD patients exhibited deficits that were equally severe across decades. RA was more severe in AD than in HD patients and the AD patients recalled significantly more items from the 1940s and 50s than from the 60s, 70s or 80s. The AD patients also displayed dysnomia, while the HD patients did not. Naming difficulties appeared to contribute to the poor overall performance of the AD patients, but did not account for the temporal gradient of their RA. These findings, like recent reports focusing on these patients' ability to learn new information and to search semantic memory, indicate that the processes underlying AD and HD patients' memory failures are distinct.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Specificity of the memory deficits associated with basal ganglia dysfunction.

Recent studies comparing the explicit and implicit memory disorders of Huntington's disease (HD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients have yielded new insights into the specificity of the memory disorders associated with basal ganglia dysfunction. Patients with HD have severe deficiencies in retrieving information from either episodic or semantic explicit memory. This retrieval deficit is not confounded by impairments in storage, rapid forgetting, intrusion errors and a deterioration of the structure of semantic knowledge. While HD patients perform normally on implicit memory tasks involving lexical, semantic and pictorial priming, they are impaired on implicit tests which require the initiation and/or modification of central motor programs. It is concluded that the basal ganglia play a specific but important role in memory although the processes they mediate are different from those dependent on the integrity of the hippocampus and diencephalon.

Basal Ganglia Diseases↗