RESUMO
Individuals with euthymic bipolar disorder (BD) type I exhibit deficits in executive functions. Although less explored in the BD population, the tasks of verbal fluency (VF) have shown great potential in understanding semantic organization. This study provides an extensive exploration across the letter and semantic VF tasks in 27 demographically matched euthymic BD-I and healthy controls (HC). The groups were compared on measures of the total number of correct words (TNCW), temporal pattern analysis, number of clusters (NC), mean cluster size (MCS), number of switches (NS), and error pattern. An overall reduction in letter fluency scores (the TNCW, number of switches, and NC) as compared to semantic fluency scores was noted for both groups, with a significantly greater decrease in the BD-1 group. The MCS and temporal pattern were relatively similar across the two groups. The influence of education with no gender difference was observed between groups with error types prevalent in both groups. The study findings call attention toward assessing the VF performance in persons with BD in terms of error production and the strategies employed (clustering-switching).
RESUMO
Telepsychiatry can be understood as an interactive mental health service providing mode using information and communication technology. In recent decades, services provided under the umbrella term of telepsychiatry expanded to cater clinical services, diagnostic services, interventions, therapies, education, and research. Since telepsychiatry has been practiced in India for two decades, various models have emerged to meet the country's demands and the logistics that are available. Both synchronous and asynchronous modes of telepsychiatry had been in practice in India depending on the availability of logistics. Most of the telepsychiatry services in India had focused on providing clinical care to reach the unreached population. Furthermore, telepsychiatry had been used to train mental health professionals and healthcare workers from other disciplines. However, not many models had incorporated the idea of hands-on training of the postgraduates/trainees of psychiatric social work (PSW) in telepsychiatry under supervision. This was addressed in the Manipal model of telepsychiatry. Manipal model of telepsychiatry has begun in 2016 with a novel idea to train mental health profession trainees in addition to cover other clinical services, research, and education. In the last eight years, four centers of Karnataka state have been covered under this model with progressive growth in a number of patients and this acted as a hands-on training model for the postgraduate trainees in starting telepsychiatry services independently. Furthermore, it provided an opportunity to develop the organization skills of trainees, improved their oratory skills, and improved their expertise in using information technology for mental healthcare delivery.
RESUMO
Event-related potential (ERP) is a useful approach to assess the neurophysiological correlates of facial emotion processing. Previous studies examined the facial emotion recognition (FER) related ERPs (N170, N250, visual MisMatch Negativity) individually using ERP specific paradigms. This approach can be time-consuming and may not resemble real-life scenarios where an individual must process multiple stimuli simultaneously. The aim of the study was to assess the utility of a combined paradigm when compared to individual paradigms to measure N170, N250 and visual MisMatch Negativity (vMMN) in healthy controls (HC), utilizing emotion stimuli standardized in the Indian population. Further, the combined paradigm was examined in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) to detect the differences in ERPs compared to HC. Within paradigms, ERPs showed higher amplitudes for emotion compared to neutral stimuli suggesting that the paradigms were able to detect valence associated with emotional stimuli. The combined paradigm was able to elicit decipherable peaks of N170, N250 and vMMN similar to individual paradigms. ERP data quality as assessed by analytic Standardized Measurement Error (aSME) showed a satisfactory aggregate score of above 2 for all the three paradigms. Combined paradigm approaches to record ERPs in neuropsychiatric conditions has the advantage of reducing the time required for task administration, avoiding practice effects, better subject cooperation and participation.
