ABSTRACT
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brains of 32 patients who met the DSM-III criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder and of 14 normal subjects frequently revealed abnormalities, but none was specific to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Spin-lattice relaxation time (T1) for right frontal white matter was prolonged in the patients compared to the control subjects, and the patients had greater right-minus-left T1 differences for frontal white matter. Right-minus-left T1 differences in the orbital frontal cortex were strongly correlated with symptom severity in the unmedicated patients and in the patients with family histories of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Subject(s)
Brain/pathology , Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy , Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder/diagnosis , Adult , Female , Frontal Lobe/pathology , Functional Laterality , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder/genetics , Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder/pathology , Psychiatric Status Rating ScalesABSTRACT
As part of the Canadian Mental Health Association Collaborative Study, the hypothesis that combined administration of nicotinic acid and pyridoxine has greater therapeutic effects than the component drugs in chronic schizophrenic patients was tested. This could not be substantiated in a 48-week study in which supplementation of neuroleptic treatment with a single vitamin, i.e., nicotinic acid or pyridoxine, produced significant therapeutic changes, while supplementation with both vitamins did not.
Subject(s)
Nicotinic Acids/therapeutic use , Pyridoxine/therapeutic use , Schizophrenia/drug therapy , Adult , Clinical Trials as Topic , Double-Blind Method , Drug Therapy, Combination , Female , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Niacin , Nicotinic Acids/adverse effects , Psychiatric Status Rating Scales , Pyridoxine/adverse effectsABSTRACT
An attempt to construct a psychophysiological (conditioning) classification of chronic schizophrenia has been reported and the relationship of this new classification with the prevailing clinical (psychopathological) classification has been examined. Our findings suggest that our chronic schizophrenic population may be described in terms of a hypothetical continuum, based on the combination of the 11 experimental variables tested. This is supported by the result that our experimental population was distributed over 97 of the possible 117 categories. Furthermore, in a Pavlovian frame of reference our population disperses into three groups: a high performance group, in which both, excitatory and inhibitory processes are relatively maintained, a moderate performance group with some impairment of the inhibitory process, and a low performance group in which both the excitatory and the inhibitory processes are relatively impaired. Heuristically even more important is the finding that these schizophrenic categories are characterized by dissociation, either within the individual functional system or between this functional systems. In most of the categories of the experimental population a characteristic dissociation of functioning appears. It is characterized by a relatively well maintained functional ability of the autonomic functional system in contrast to an impaired skeletomuscular system. This dissociation resembles the phenomenon of schizokinesis. Since the morphological substrates of our experimental variables are those which are also affected by a variety of psychoactive drugs with well defined neurophysiological action, the categories delineated in this study would be verified by differential psychopharmacological responsiveness.
