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Biomedical subjects

P Eling

Publications and source records attributed to P Eling.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Conditional responding is impaired in chronic alcoholics.

Bechara (2003) describes a model for disturbances in executive functions related to addiction. This model involves deficits in decision-making and in suppressing pre-potent representations or response patterns. We tested this model in 29 individuals with long-term heavy alcohol dependency and compared their performance with that of 20 control subjects. Only individuals without memory impairment, with normal intelligence and normal visual response times were included. We examined word fluency, object alternation, spatial stimulus-response incompatibility, extra-dimensional shift learning and decision-making using the Gambling task. We subtracted the performance in a control condition from that of the executive condition, in order to focus specifically on the executive component of each task. Only the object alternation and incompatibility tasks revealed significant differences between the group of alcoholics and the control group. Moreover, response times in the object alternation task correlated with duration of alcohol dependency. The results do not argue in favor of a specific deficit in decision-making or in shifting between relevant representations. We conclude that long-term alcohol abuse leads to an impairment in conditional responding, provided the response depends on former reactions or the inhibition of pre-potent response patterns.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Depressive symptoms predict slow cognitive decline in mild dementia.

Depression may be a prognostic marker of subsequent cognitive decline in patients with dementia. Earlier investigations did not find support for this hypothesis, but these considered mainly syndromal depression. In this prospective study, 32 subjects with mild dementia were followed up for 12 months. The effects of GMS-AGECAT syndromal depression, subsyndromal depression and dimensions of depressive symptoms were studied. Higher levels of mood symptoms but not (sub)syndromal depression predicted slower cognitive decline during follow-up. It is hypothesized that the report of depressive symptoms by subjects with mild dementia reflects relative intactness of cognitive functions, not accounted for by cognitive screening instruments.

Affect↗
PubMed2003

Frontal lobe dysfunctions in Korsakoff's syndrome and chronic alcoholism: continuity or discontinuity?

The effect of long-term heavy alcohol consumption on brain functions is still under debate. The authors investigated a sample of 17 Korsakoff amnesics, 23 alcoholics without Korsakoff's syndrome, and 21 controls with peripheral nerve diseases, matched for intelligence and education. Executive functions were examined for word fluency, the modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, an alternate response task, and an "n-back" working memory task. Korsakoff amnesics, but not alcoholics, showed a marked memory impairment. They also scored lower in each of the executive tasks-the alcoholics only in the alternate response task. This task also correlated with the years of the alcohol dependency. First, the authors conclude that Korsakoff's syndrome is associated not only with a memory impairment but also with a global executive deficit. Second, the decline in the ability to alternate between different responses argues for a restricted neurotoxic effect of alcohol on some frontal lobe areas.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Memory impairment in those who attempted suicide by benzodiazepine overdose.

BACKGROUND: A prospective study was conducted to investigate the presence of anterograde amnesia in those who attempted suicide by benzodiazepine overdose and to study the correlation with sedation. METHOD: In 43 patients who attempted suicide by taking benzodiazepines, memory was tested with a 15-word memory recall task. The immediate and delayed recall on the first day after admission (day 1) and 24 hours later (day 2) were rated. Each patient and the interviewer scored the patient's degree of sedation on a visual analogue scale. Patients also had to try to recognize, from photographs, the psychiatrist with whom they had spoken the day before. RESULTS: The ratings of immediate and delayed recall were significantly lower on day 1 than on day 2. Subjective ratings of sedation of the patients were not significantly higher than the ratings of the observer. Less than half of the patients recognized the psychiatrists and knew that they were the ones they had spoken to the day before. CONCLUSION: Anterograde amnesia is present in suicide attempters who take overdoses of benzodiazepines. The implications of this finding for the assessment of suicide attempters during admission are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Jacobus Schroeder van der Kolk (1797-1862): his resistance against materialism.

Schroeder van der Kolk is regarded as the founder of Dutch psychiatry and neurology. This paper describes his vitalistic views on the relation between body and soul, as formulated by him in a series of lectures. These lectures were intended to counteract the materialistic tendencies of some of Schroeder van der Kolk's French and German contemporaries. It is argued that Schroeder van der Kolk can be regarded as the transition in Holland from the "Naturphilosophie" approach to the modern experimental approach in physiology.

History, 18th Century↗
PubMed1996

Stroop interference and disorders of selective attention.

Fourteen patients with right-hemisphere CVA and 8 patients with a left-hemisphere CVA were examined for selective attention deficits using a variant of the Stroop color-word task: the picture-word interference task. Experiments 1 and 2 first compared the performance of the two patient groups and a control group in three tasks of increasing difficulty: picture-word detection, word reading, and picture naming. The results showed that (a) the two patient groups were significantly slower than the control group, but did not differ from each other, and (b) the difference in mean RT between the two patient groups and the control group did not increase with task difficulty. In Experiment 3, the subjects were required to name pictures while ignoring accompanying distractors: nonletter symbols, unrelated words or semantically related words. In this task, the right hemisphere patients showed a much larger semantic interference effect than both the left hemisphere patients and the control group. It is argued that this finding most probably reflects problems in visual selective attention with the right hemisphere patients.

Aged↗
PubMed1990

Bilingual language processing after a lesion in the left thalamic and temporal regions. A case report with early childhood onset.

This case study concerns an 18-year-old bilingual girl who suffered a radiation lesion in the left (dominant) thalamic and temporal region when she was 4 years old. Language and memory assessment revealed deficits in auditory short-term memory, auditory word comprehension, nonword repetition, syntactic processing, word fluency, and confrontation naming tasks. Both languages (English and Dutch) were found to be affected in a similar manner, despite the fact that one language (English) was acquired before and the other (Dutch) after the period of lesion onset. Most of the deficits appear to be related to verbal (short-term) memory dysfunction. Several hypotheses of subcortical involvement in memory processes are discussed with reference to existing theories in this area.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

[Hemisphere differences in aging: an artifact].

The observation that language processes in particular resist aging relatively well, gave rise to the hypothesis that the right hemisphere declines more rapidly than the left. In this review we discuss results from different lines of research relevant to this issue. It appears that the hypothesis is based on methodologically weak studies. Factors such as task characteristics, familiarity with stimulus materials and practice effects have been controlled insufficiently in the past and they may well explain the observed effects. Moreover, no clear neuropathological differences between the hemispheres have been reported. Therefore, it seems reasonable not to assume differential rates of aging for the two hemispheres.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Paragrammatic speech without a comprehension deficit? A case report.

In this article we present a case report of a patient, who had a peculiar pattern of language use following a stroke. The two most prominent features were language switches during spontaneous speech in the first months postonset, when the patient mixed English, German, and French words and utterances into his mother tongue (Dutch); clearly disturbed speech output, showing signs of word-finding problems and paragrammatism but hardly any paraphasias, while at the same time no evidence of a language disturbance could be obtained with standard clinical aphasia tests.

Aged↗
PubMed1986

Recognition of derivations in Broca's aphasics.

A well-known feature of Broca's aphasia is the problem of handling "small words." It has been claimed that patients show these problems in both language production and language perception. The traditional dichotomy of "function" words and "content" words is probably not a good description of the classes of words that are affected and intact. It has long been recognized that not only do Broca's aphasics have problems with free closed class morphemes, but that also bound morphemes, such as verb inflections, are often omitted in spontaneous speech. The question arises whether all bound morphemes, being members of the closed class category, are difficult to process for Broca's aphasics. Using a lexical decision task the recognition of derivational word forms was studied in Broca's aphasics and two control groups. The pattern of results is very similar in the three groups. Derivational word forms are recognized as lexical items independent of the stem. It is concluded that Broca's aphasics can process derivational affixes appropriately. The consequences of this conclusion for the characterization of the class of "small" words are discussed.

Adult↗