Posttraumatic stress disorder after myocardial infarction and coronary artery bypass grafting.

Post traumatic stress disorder is a psychiatric disease that is usually precipitated by life threatening stressors. Myocardial infarction, especially in the young can count as one such event. The development of post traumatic stress after a coronary event not only adversely effects psychiatric health, but leads to increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. There is increasing evidence that like major depression, post traumatic stress disorder is also a strong coronary risk factor. Early diagnosis and treatment of this disease in patients with acute manifestations of coronary artery disease can improve patient outcomes.

The impact of level of education on age-related deficits in associative memory: Behavioral and neuropsychological perspectives.

Older adults have difficulty forming associations and binding distinct item components despite mostly preserved item memory potentially because they rely on more automatic, rather than strategic, processing when attempting to form, store, and retrieve associations from memory. An intriguing possibility is that older adults with greater access to strategic processes (e.g., those with a high level of education) may be less susceptible to age-related associative memory deficits. Two experiments assessed the degree to which a high level of education provides an effective dose of cognitive reserve (CR), potentially preserving associative memory. Standard younger and older adults' item and associative memory performance was compared to older adults who had attained a high level of education (mostly doctoral degrees). In both experiments (Experiment 1: person-action pairs; Experiment 2: unrelated word pairs), consistent evidence was found that older adults, regardless of the level of education, exhibited an age-related associative memory deficit relative to younger adults. Interestingly, neuropsychological assessment of both older adult groups revealed greater frontal lobe, but not enhanced medial temporal lobe, functioning in the highly educated. As such, although the highly educated older adults exhibited greater frontal lobe functioning than the standard older adults, this did not aid in the reduction of the age-related associative memory deficit.