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Biomedical subjects

N Butters

Publications and source records attributed to N Butters.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources
PubMed1983

Computed tomographic, neurologic, and neuropsychological correlates of Huntington's disease.

Twenty-six patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and three subjects at risk for HD were evaluated by computed tomographic, neurologic and neuropsychological examinations. These data were used to delineate the sequence of structural changes in early and intermediate HD, and the relationship of these changes to impairment of neurologic and cognitive function. CT scans documented an early neostriatal-frontal focus of atrophy in HD which spreads caudally over the cerebral cortex during the course of the disease. Chorea was positively correlated with caudate atrophy. Functional and cognitive (especially memory and visuospatial) impairments were strongly related to the degree of atrophy. Multiple regression analyses of CT and neuropsychological data further demonstrated that neostriatal changes make a significant contribution to the cognitive as well as to the motor impairments of HD patients.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Learning to associate names and faces. Impaired acquisition on an ecologically relevant memory task by male alcoholics.

The performance of a group of detoxified male chronic alcoholics was compared with that of age-matched nonalcoholic controls on a memory task which at face value seemed relevant to daily life--i.e., learning to associate people's names with their faces. The alcoholics not only made more errors while learning the face-name associations than did the controls, but fewer of them were able to reach the learning criterion. However, 1 hour later, the alcoholics were nevertheless able to recognize all of the faces and names used during acquisition. The savings scores for the alcoholics, an index of the relative number of face-name associations retained during the 1-hour interval, did not differ significantly from those of the controls. These results demonstrate that the alcoholics' paired-associate learning deficit on this ecologically relevant task is related to their failure to form associations rather than to deficiencies in recognition memory or perceptual processes.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1982

A preliminary report: nutritional levels and cognitive performance in chronic alcohol abusers.

The relationship between vitamin levels, alcohol intake and cognitive status was examined in a group of 19 chronic alcoholics who had just begun to withdraw from alcohol. The results indicate that during this stage of detoxification levels of folic acid are the best predictors of cognitive performance. Alcohol intake, as measured by either total life consumption or years of alcohol abuse, was only weakly associated with neuropsychological tests scores. It is suggested that the cognitive recovery that occurs during the first weeks of abstinence may be related to nutritional variables, whereas the longer-lasting neuropsychological impairments of alcohol abusers may be related to the direct neurotoxic effects of alcohol.

Adult↗
PubMed1981

Patterns of remote memory in amnesic and demented patients.

Patients with Huntington's disease (HD) were compared on three tests of remote memory with patients with alcoholic Korsakoff's syndrome (KS) and with control subjects. Though both patient groups were severely impaired in overall performance with respect to the normal control subjects on all three tests, striking differences were evident in the degree of loss for each decade interval. The patients with HD had as much difficulty identifying faces and events from the 1930s and 1940s as faces and events from the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the pattern of their remote memory loss was "flat", that is, equal for all periods sampled. The retrograde amnesia of the patients with KS was characterized by a steep temporal gradient in which facts pertaining to the distant past were more accurately retrieved than facts concerning events that occurred just prior to the onset of their illness. Taken in conjunction with other recent studies of retrograde amnesia, these results suggest that neurologic patients exhibit at least three different patterns of remote memory loss.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed1981

Development of remote memory loss in patients with Huntington's disease.

Patients recently diagnosed with Huntington's Disease (RHD) were compared to three tests of remote memory to advanced Huntington's Disease patients and to control subjects. The RHD patients demonstrated a remote memory impairment that was particularly evident when no cues were given to aid recall. Thus, early in the disease process, HD patients not only are impaired in the acquisition of new materials but have difficulty recalling remote events. It was also significant that, like the advanced patients, the deficits of the RHD patients extended over many decades, with approximately equivalent losses for each decade interval. This suggests that one form of retrograde amnesia consists of an extensive ungrade loss of remote memories.

Adult↗
PubMed1981

Memory for prose in Korsakoff and schizophrenic populations.

Twelve alcoholic Korsakoff patients, their 12 alcoholic controls, and 27 institutionalized schizophrenics and their 19 controls, recalled two stories. The clinical populations recalled approximately half as much as their controls, yet recalled the same parts of the stories as their controls. For both groups the ability to process simple prose does not seem to be severely impaired when what is recalled rather than how much is recalled is measured.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1981

The Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome: a review of psychological, neuropathological and etiological factors.

During the past 10 years numerous investigations concerned with the neuropsychological, neuropathological and etiological factors involved in alcoholic Korsakoff's syndrome have been published. The neuropsychological research has focused on the patients' anterograde and retrograde amnesias, and several theories based upon current models of human information processing have been advanced as partial explanations of the amnesic syndrome. While neuropathological investigations have continued to implicate midline diencephalic structures in the chronic symptoms of this disorder, some very recent studies have begun to assess the role of neurotransmitters in the patients' memory disorders. The etiology of the disorder also appears to be more complex than once believed. Animal studies demonstrating the neurotoxicity of alcohol have suggested that the patients' severe memory deficits may be due to an interaction of malnutrition and the toxic effects of alcohol. Behavioral investigations reporting that non-Korsakoff alcoholics have memory deficits qualitatively similar to those of Korsakoff patients support the idea that Korsakoff's syndrome is not acute but may develop slowly during decades of alcohol abuse.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Further evidence for a continuum-of-impairment encompassing male alcoholic Korsakoff patients and chronic alcoholic men.

A battery of challening tests was used to assess learning ability and short-term memory in groups of detoxified chronic alcoholics with and without complaints of memory impairment, alcoholic Korsakoff patients, and nonalcoholic controls. While alcoholics without memory complaints did not differ from controls on standardized clinical memory tests, their performance was significantly impaired on our more demanding experimental tests. In contrast, the performance of alcoholics reporting memory complaints was impaired, relative to the other alcoholics, on both clinical and experimental memory tests, overlapping that of the alcoholig Korsakoff patients. These results are consonant with Ryback's continuum-of-impairment hypothesis.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed1980

Deficits in short-term auditory memory for verbal material following right temporal removals in humans.

Right, as well as left, temporal patients were significantly impaired on shot-sterm auditory memory for consonant trigrams. The severity of the deficit shown by both groups was not related to the association value (low, medium, high) of the trigrams or the duration of the intertrial intervals (from 6 sec to 1 min) used in this study. Right temporal patients were also deficient on tests of tonal memory and delayed facial recognition. The results are discussed in terms of a sequential model of information processing involving modality-specific short-term memory and material-specific long-term retention.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Temporal gradients in the retrograde amnesia of patients with alcoholic Korsakoff's disease.

Eleven alcoholic patients with Korsakoff's disease and 15 control subjects were given three tests of retrograde amnesia. The first consisted of photographs of famous faces from the past, the second was a recall test of famous people and events, and the third was a multiple-choice questionnaire. To determine whether previously reported temporal gradients (ie, preservation of remote events) were related to item difficulty, half of the questions dealt with events of transient fame while half concerned subjects that continued to receive public attention for many years. The findings indicate that alcoholic patients with Korsakoff's disease have a marked retrograde amnesia that is characterized by a steep temporal gradient, and that this gradient is not an artifact due to the difficulty of the questions or the method of testing.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗