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Biomedical subjects

W W Beatty

Publications and source records attributed to W W Beatty.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Impaired affective prosody in AD: relationship to aphasic deficits and emotional behaviors.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the ability of patients with AD to produce, repeat, and comprehend affective prosody in relationship to severity of dementia, aphasic deficits, and changes in emotional behaviors. METHODS: An Aprosodia Battery was used to assess affective-prosodic performance and to identify patterns of deficits in affective communication. In addition, the presence and severity of aberrant behaviors, depression, and aphasia were assessed using standardized assessment tools. RESULTS: Patients with AD had significant impairments in their ability to repeat, comprehend, and discriminate affective aspects of speech, but maintained normal spontaneous affective-prosodic performances. As dementia severity increased, performance on the comprehension tasks and, to a lesser degree, on the repetition tasks became more impaired; spontaneous affective prosody remained normal. In the current study, affective-prosodic comprehension impairments were present in patients with all stages of AD; comparable aphasic deficits were not observed until patients were severely demented. The majority of aphasic deficits involved anomia without loss of comprehension. Patients with AD with sensory aprosodia had increased frequency and severity of behavioral changes whereas patients with AD with normal affective-prosodic performance were significantly less demented, had normal linguistic ability, and displayed fewer aberrant psychiatric behaviors. CONCLUSION: Patients with mild AD are at considerable risk for affective-prosodic comprehension deficits. As patients become more demented and develop sensory aprosodia, they are at greater risk for disturbances in behavior and mood.

Affect↗
PubMed2000

Forms of knowledge, cognitive impairment and drug abuse: a demonstration.

Chronic abusers of alcohol and other drugs often exhibit persistent deficits on neuropsychological tests. These deficits are usually attributed to drug-induced brain dysfunction or to familial factors that depress performance independent of drug abuse. The aim of this study was to determine the plausibility of a third explanation: namely that some neuropsychological deficits of drug abusers arise because they acquire different forms of knowledge from non-drug abusers. This hypothesis predicts that drug abusers should excel on tests of knowledge that is related to their lifestyle. Sixty-three clients from a local methadone clinic and a comparison group of 24 non-abusing subjects who were knowledgeable about drugs listened to a song about cocaine addiction. They were asked to identify the title, artist, year the song was first popular and the meaning of the song. There were no significant differences between the groups in identifying the song title, artist or year, but the drug-abusers were significantly more likely to state that the song was about cocaine or drug addiction. In interpreting deficits by drug abusers on neuropsychological tests, differences in knowledge acquired should be considered.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Neuropsychological deficits in sober alcoholics: influences of chronicity and recent alcohol consumption.

BACKGROUND: The relationships between severity of neuropsychological (NP) deficits and quantity and duration of alcoholic drinking remain controversial. Eckardt et al. (1998) proposed that NP deficits can be observed only if chronicity of alcohol abuse equals or exceeds 10 years. In this study we tested the hypothesis of Eckardt et al. and reexamined the relationship of NP performance and alcohol consumption. METHODS: One hundred sixty-two alcoholics and 165 controls completed a NP test battery at least 3 weeks after the alcoholics attained sobriety. Chronicity varied from 4 to 9 years for 55 alcoholics and from 10 to 33 years for the remaining 107. RESULTS: Compared to controls, both groups of alcoholics were impaired on the Shipley Vocabulary and Abstraction tests and on two versions of the Digit Symbol test, but there was no difference between the two alcoholic groups on any measure. Regression analyses that controlled for age and education showed that chronicity predicted less than 0.5% of the variance on NP measures. By contrast, a measure of recent alcohol consumption, the Quantity-Frequency Index, contributed significantly (approximately 5% of the variance) to the prediction of alcoholics' NP performance. CONCLUSIONS: These data provide weak support for a dose effect relationship between degree of NP impairment and level of alcoholic drinking in the past 6 months but no evidence for an influence of chronicity.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Psychological and neuropsychological predictors of coping patterns by patients with multiple sclerosis.

To determine the relative contribution of psychological and neuropsychological (NP) variables to the prediction of patterns of coping with disease-related stressors and satisfaction with their coping efforts, 56 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) were administered the Ways of Coping Checklist, the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised, and a battery of NP tests chosen for their sensitivity to MS. Higher levels of psychological distress were associated with greater use of emotion-focused coping strategies and reduced perceived effectiveness of the coping strategies employed. Psychological distress was not related to the use of problem-focused strategies and NP variables did not predict coping style or effectiveness. MS patients who display heightened psychological distress may be good candidates for psychotherapeutic interventions aimed at improving perceived coping effectiveness.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1999

Representations of knowledge about dominoes in demented and normal elderly players.

1. Dementia patients who retain musical and game-playing skills exhibit impaired performance on explicit memory tests of knowledge about their retained skill. 2. Dementia patients who retain skill at playing dominoes can answer complex questions about the play of the game almost as well as normal elderly domino players when the questions are presented with real dominoes. 3. The aim of this study was to determine if skilled dementia patients could answer questions about domino play when the stimuli were two-dimensional drawings of dominoes. 4. Seventeen dementia patients and eight normal elderly domino players were tested on two forms of the Domino Quiz: first with real dominoes, then with two-dimensional drawings; other neuropsychological tests were given at the same time. 5. Fourteen of the 17 patients and all of the controls showed no decline in answering questions about domino play when two-dimensional drawings were used. These patients showed retained symbolic processing of information about dominoes despite declines in overall mental status, generation of words from specific semantic categories, and recognition memory for domino terminology. 6. Because the 14 patients with retained domino skill performed as accurately as controls on both administrations of a letter cancellation task, the ability to process familiar symbols may be important to their game-playing skill.

Aged↗
PubMed1999

Preserved cognitive skills in dementia: implications for geriatric medicine.

Despite their severe and global cognitive impairments, some patients with Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia continue to perform some complex mental activities skillfully. This paper briefly describes the artistic and game-playing skills of dementia patients, presents preliminary findings indicating that dementia patients with preserved skills exhibit slower cognitive deterioration than patients without retained cognitive skills, and illustrates how caregivers and other persons can utilize preserved abilities in the management of agitated and disruptive behavior.

Aged↗
PubMed1998

Cortical and subcortical influences on clustering and switching in the performance of verbal fluency tasks.

Impairments on lexical and semantic fluency tasks occur in both cortical and subcortical dementia. Recent reports that the average size of phonemic and semantic clusters is reduced in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but not in Parkinson's disease (PD) could support the hypothesis that in AD verbal fluency deficits arise from degraded memory storage while in PD the same impairments result from defective retrieval. In the present study, patients with AD, PD with dementia, or Huntington's disease produced fewer words, fewer switching responses and smaller semantic cluster sizes. Patients with multiple sclerosis, regardless of whether or not they were demented, produced fewer words and switching responses, but normal size clusters, and patients with PD without dementia performed normally on all fluency measures. These results indicate that reductions in cluster size on verbal fluency tests are best interpreted as changes in the efficiency of access to lexical and semantic memory stores. The findings are also consistent with the idea that patterns of cognitive impairment may differ among diseases that result in subcortical dementia.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Impairments of attention in individuals with multiple sclerosis.

To investigate the status of attention in multiple sclerosis (MS) we administered tests of focused and divided attention to 39 MS patients and 18 age- and education-matched control subjects. In addition, a test of vigilance and a test of automatic information processing was administered. MS patients performed as well as controls on the automatic processing task and on most measures of focused and divided attention when accuracy but not speed was the dependent variable. By contrast, the MS patients performed significantly worse than controls on the more effortful measures of attention, especially those that engaged working memory or emphasized speeded responding. These results indicate that deficits of attention in MS patients are most likely to be evident on tasks which require concentrated cognitive effort.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1998

Correlates of coping style in patients with multiple sclerosis.

To examine certain correlates of patterns of coping with stress, 43 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) read a vignette describing a stressful social situation and completed the Ways of Coping Checklist, describing how they would cope with the stressful situation. Performance on a test of solving problems in everyday living was positively correlated with the total number of coping responses and with the number of problem-focused strategies, but neither vocabulary nor verbal abstract reasoning were related to coping patterns. In agreement with earlier work, increases in psychological distress were positively correlated with endorsement of emotion-focused coping strategies but unrelated to the use of other coping responses.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1998

Long-lived picture priming in normal elderly persons and demented patients.

Normal elderly control participants showed short-term (10-min delay) and long-term (12 months delay) priming on the Gollin Figures Test. Nearly all patients with Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia showed short-term priming, but the magnitude of their priming was less than that of controls. Significant long-term priming was not observed for the dementia groups. Differences between controls and dementia patients on the short-term priming test may depend upon structural-perceptual processes that are intact in dementia patients and controls and explicit memory functions available only to controls. The same model could account for differences between normal elderly and dementia patients on the long-term priming test, but several other explanations are also plausible.

Aged↗
PubMed1997

Spatial cognition in alcoholics: influence of concurrent abuse of other drugs.

Several tests of visuospatial cognition are known to be sensitive to chronic alcohol abuse, but the consequences of combined abuse of alcohol and other drugs on these measures in not known. To address this issue, groups that had abused only alcohol, alcohol and marijuana, or alcohol and multiple other drugs (Alc/Poly) were compared to community controls. Testing occurred after at least 3 weeks of treatment for the drug abusers. On all measures of visuospatial perception and construction and on all measures of visuospatial learning and memory, all groups of alcoholics were impaired relative to controls, but there were no significant differences among the groups that abused alcohol. By contrast, on all measures of geographical knowledge that required place localization, subjects in the Alc/Poly group were impaired while subjects who abused only alcohol or alcohol and marijuana performed as well as controls. Measures of alcohol consumption, mood or childhood or adult attention deficit were not consistently correlated with test performance.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Coping with general and disease-related stressors by patients with multiple sclerosis: relationships to psychological distress.

This study examined the relationships between coping styles and psychological distress in a non-institutionalized sample of individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS). The MS sample completed a measure of psychological distress and identified coping strategies utilized for stressors that were disease-related and general in nature. They also self-reported their perceived efficacy of the coping strategies utilized for both stressors. Individuals with MS exhibited greater levels of depression and their indices of psychological distress than demographically matched controls but the patterns of coping strategies endorsed and the ratings of coping effectiveness were similar for the two groups. When coping with disease-related stressors, individuals with MS utilized coping strategies that were more emotion-focused and dependent but no less effective than when the same patients coped with general stressors. Within the MS group, high levels of psychological distress were positively correlated with the use of emotion-focused coping strategies, but were unrelated to the use of problem-focused strategies. Most individuals with MS individuals with MS appear to be able to modify their coping strategies to adopt to varying sorts of stressors.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1997

Expression of game-related and generic knowledge by dementia patients who retain skill at playing dominoes.

Patients with dementia who remain skilled at musical performance or playing bridge fail explicit memory tests for information related to their skills, suggesting that implicit memory mediates their preserved skills. To reexamine this issue, 23 dementia patients and 15 elderly controls of comparable domino-playing skill were compared on tests of naming, verbal fluency, and domino knowledge. On an explicit test of domino knowledge, the patients scored well below the elderly controls, performing no better than students who were unfamiliar with the game. But when game-like situations were created with real dominoes, both the skilled controls and the patients with dementia chose optimal moves and verbally explained their choices equally well. On naming and fluency tests, the skilled patients showed no advantage over patients of comparable dementia severity who had no retained skill. In dementia, some complex knowledge seems intact but is accessible only in particular contexts.

Aged↗
PubMed1997

Free radical production during ethanol intoxication, dependence, and withdrawal.

Indices of free radical production and cell damage were examined in male Sprague-Dawley rats chronically exposed to either ethanol (ETOH) or water vapor. In experiment 1, rats experienced either 1 or 11 cycles of ETOH exposure and withdrawal. Brain tissue was harvested 12 hr after ETOH exposure, and 1 hr after being injected with sodium salicylate as a scavenger. Brain tissue was analyzed for the formation of salicylate hydroxylation products as a measure of .OH production during withdrawal. Significant group differences for .OH production were demonstrated for 2,3- and 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid in the single cycle ETOH exposed rats compared with their water cohorts. A significant between group difference for 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid, only, was demonstrated for the multiple cycles of ETOH exposure. Spontaneous seizures were shown to correlate with increased production of .OH in ETOH exposed rats. In experiment 2, brain tissue was harvested from different groups of rats after removal from the chambers, at 0, 2, 12, 24, 36, and 48 hr after a single exposure cycle. Tissue was analyzed for (1) salicylate hydroxylation (as above), (2) glutamine synthetase activity, (3) whole brain glutamate concentration, and (4) oxidized protein. A multiple regression analysis was conducted on the five dependent variables and found they could be predicted by specific behavioral and neurological ratings. These data suggest that cell damage during withdrawal may have multiple time-dependent components.

Alcohol Withdrawal Delirium↗
PubMed1997

Autobiographical memory in multiple sclerosis.

Studies have consistently found that patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) are impaired on tests of anterograde memory, but the status of remote memory in MS remains unclear. To better understand remote memory in MS we administered the Autobiographical Memory Interview (AMI) to 44 MS patients and 19 normal controls matched for age, education, and gender. Additionally, a shortened version of the Famous Faces Test, a test of recall of past U.S. presidents, and a 14-word learning list were administered. Patients performed significantly lower than controls on the learning list and Famous Faces Test, but not on recall of past presidents. On the AMI, patients were significantly impaired on recall of semantic but not of episodic memories. These results indicate that MS patients exhibit retrograde amnesia that cannot be attributed to anterograde memory deficits or lack of exposure to task-relevant information.

Adult↗