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Biomedical subjects

N Butters

Publications and source records attributed to N Butters.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources
PubMed1979

Continuities in the olfactory deficits of chronic alcoholics and alcoholics with the Korsakoff syndrome.

Olfactory dysfunction, a finding prevalent among alcoholic Korsakoff patients, was investigated in long-term alcoholics with Korsakoff's Syndrome. The results demonstrate that alcoholics are impaired on odor quality discrimination but performed normally on complex hue discriminations. These findings support the hypothesis that chronic alcoholics and alcoholic Korsakoff patients represent two points on a single continuum of cognitive deterioration associated with alcohol abuse.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed1978

Afferent and efferent subcortical projections of behaviorally defined sectors of prefrontal granular cortex.

Although the functional significance of the midprincipalis region is well known, the afferent and efferent connections of this zone, in comparison to the anterior and posterior portions of the cortex lining the principal sulcus, are poorly understood. In 3 animals the retrograde tracer HRP and the anterograde tracers, tritiated proline, lysine and leucine, were injected into the sulcal cortex lining the principal sulcus. The cortex forming the banks of the principal sulcus was divided into anterior, middle and posterior sectors with one animal used for each zone. As expected from previous studies, the heaviest afferents to the cortex forming the principal sulcus were from the parvocellular portions of the medical dorsal nucleus. The medial pulvinar nucleus and the nucleus limitans projected to only the anterior and posterior portions of the cortex lining the principal sulcus. Projections were seen to all 3 sectors from the anterior, midline, intralaminar and lateral thalamic nuclei. Although cells were seen in the hypothalamus following injections in all 3 sectors of the cortex lining the principal sulcus, the heaviest hypothalamic projections were noted after injections into the mid-sector of the cortex. These HRP-positive cells were in the dorsal and lateral hypothalamic area, dorsal medial nucleus and in the lateral mammillary nucleus. These findings link the midprincipalis region with the prefrontolimbic circuit, and suggest that the midprincipalis region, n. medialis dorsalis, the mammillary bodies and perhaps the cingulate gyrus constitute part of an anatomical circuit concerned with memory processes.

Afferent Pathways↗
PubMed1978

Comparison of the neuropsychological deficits associated with early and advanced Huntington's disease.

Patients with "recently" diagnosed Huntington's Disease (RHD) were compared on a neuropsychological test battery to patients who have had the disease three to 15 years (AHD) and to intact controls. While the patients with HD showed general nonfocal deficits on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Wechsler Memory Scale, and tests of short-term memory and verbal fluency, the patients with RHD had focal deficits that stressed their memory deficits. The patients with RHD had IQs within the normal range, but their memory quotients, their performance on short-term memory tests, and their ability to search and retrieve from long-term memory were severely imparied. These results suggest that the cognitive deficits of patients with HD do not develop uniformally; memory disorders are early focal signs that precede the patients' more widespread intellectual deterioration.

Adult↗
PubMed1977

Clinical manifestations of chronic thiamine deficiency in rhesus monkey.

In the course of multiple episodes of thiamine deficiency in the rhesus monkey, the triad of anorexia, apathy, and hind limb weakness is the earliest clinical manifestation. In later episodes, nystagmus, abducens paresis, midline ataxia, dysmetria, and congestive heart failure are also seen. With the exception of dysmetria, the neurologic signs promptly respond to thiamine administration. Pair-fed controls showed no clinical signs. Neither peripheral neuropathy nor edema was observed. Thiamine-deficiency in the experimental animals was confirmed by blood transketolase assays.

Abducens Nerve↗
PubMed1977

Visuoperceptual processes in brain damaged patients on the digit symbol substitution test.

Alcoholic Korsakoff patients, patients with right hemisphere damage, and chronic alcoholics are impaired on the digit symbol substitution task (DSST) of the WAIS. To determine whether these deficits were related to psychomotor or visuoperceptive factors, several tasks and modifications of the DSST were administered to these three patient populations. While it was evident that psychomotor retardation contributed to the patients' poor performance, impairments in visuoperceptive processing were also found to be involved in the DSST performance of the three patient groups. It was concluded that while a psychomotor factor is the crucial variable in the performance of intact normal subjects, any of a number of visual processing variables (e.g., visual scanning, contour formation and organization) must be considered in assessing the deficits of brain damaged patients.

Aged↗
PubMed1976

A comparison of the information processing deficits of patients with Huntington's chorea and Korsakoff's syndrome.

Patients with Huntington's Chorea and alcholic Korsakoff's disease were compared on six tests of short-term memory (STM) and of encoding capacity. While the alcoholic Korsakoff patients demonstrated STM disorders related to an increase sensitivity to proactive interference (PI) and to failures in semantic encoding, the Chorea patients had a different pattern of deficits. The Chorea patients, like the Korsakoffs, had STM deficits, but their memory performance did not improve with reductions in PI, and they had different types of encoding deficits than did the Korsakoff patients. These results demonstrate that information processing tasks can be used to empirically differentiate amnesic patients with normal I.Q.'s from patients with dementia-related memory impairments.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed1976

The differential effects of semantic, acoustic, and nonverbal distraction on Korsakoff patients' verbal retention performance.

Korsakoff and alcoholic control patients' verbal retention performance was assessed following either acoustic, semantic, or nonverbal distractor activity. Both patient groups were similarly affected by the degree of relatedness between the distractor and the memoranda. Semantic distraction produced more verbal forgetting than acoustic, which in turn, caused more forgetting than the nonverbal tasks. The Korsakoff patients' verbal retention, however, became increasingly impaired, relative to the controls, as the level of similarity between the distraction and the memoranda increased. These results suggest that Korsakoff patients have difficulty performing verbal analyses which incorporated the distinctive physical, phonemic and semantic features of the memoranda into the development of their verbal memory traces.

Acoustics↗
PubMed1975

Some connections of the entorhinal (area 28) and perirhinal (area 35) cortices of the rhesus monkey. II. Frontal lobe afferents.

In this investigation, the efferent cortico-cortical projections of the orbitofrontal cortex in the rhesus monkey have been investigated using silver impregnation methods. Projections from this area were observed to terminate in the rostral portions of the temporal lobe (areas TA, TE and TG) and cingulate gyrus (area 24), the insular cortex, and some dorsolateral prefrontal areas. Although these connections characterized all areas, with the exception of Walker's area 14 and Bonin and Bailey's area FL, the caudal levels of the orbitofrontal area were found to give rise to an additional projection which terminated in the entorhinal cortex and the transitional cortices bordering the rhinal sulcus. The source of this projection correlated closely with an area labeled FF by Bonin and Bailey. This connection may provide a much more direct means for the frontal lobe to influence the hippocampus than those involving the cingulate gyrus.

Amygdala↗