The Role of Instructional Set on Alcoholic Performance

This study was conducted to determine whether alcoholic and control subjects respond differently to manipulations that either enhance personal involvement (PI) or reduce negative affect (R, relaxation) on tests of neuropsychological function. In Phase 1, 48 male alcoholics and 36 male control subjects completed neuropsychological tasks under standard instructional sets. In Phase 2, subjects completed equivalent forms of these tests under one of three randomly assigned conditions; the PI condition in which subjects were encouraged to identify specific ways of improving their performance, the R condition in which subjects participated in a short relaxation exercise designed to reduce anxiety, or a No Treatment (NT) condition in which no attempt to manipulate the subjects' involvement or affect was made. Alcoholics were inferior to controls in both Phase 1 and Phase 2 [Fs (1,82) > 5.03, ps < 0.03]. The experimental manipulation differentially affected measures of negative affect and effort in the predicted direction. There were no group x condition interactions. Alcoholic and control subjects responded comparably to the experimental manipulations. This investigation, in combination with others using related manipulations, reinforces the hypothesis that alcohol-related cognitives dysfunction reflects an underlying deficit in brain states.     

口腔修复中高熔铸件浇铸不全的原因浅析及预防

目的:探讨高熔铸件浇铸不全的可能原因。方法:通过对临床85件可摘铸件缺损的初浅分析,总结出浇铸不全的可能原因。结果:高熔铸件浇铸不全的原因有以下7个方面:①铸金量不足;②熔金温度过低;③离心力不够;④铸道布局不当;⑤铸件过薄;⑥高温包埋料透气性差;⑦铸圈温度下降。结论:通过查找原因,总结出预防的方法,对提高高熔铸件修复体的质量有一定的作用。     

Anna Freud: A New Look at Development

This paper is a summary of Anna Freud's important contribution to our understanding of child development and its deviations. It highlights her concern for the whole child, both his internal and external world and their mutual interactions. An example is given of changes in the law with regard to children in which her views were influential. Vignettes are given showing the evolution of her thinking regarding treatment techniques in the light of the widening range of developmental disturbances and presenting problems.     

Alcohol-Related Efficiency Deficits Using an Ecologically Valid Test

This study investigated whether male and female alcoholics and controls differed in their ability to solve an ecologically valid measure of abstraction. Ninety-one alcoholics (39 females, 52 males) and 61 community controls (36 females, 26 males) completed a battery of abstraction tasks including a Piagetian-type task, the Plant Task. The Plant Task demands that subjects predict the outcome of an unseen plant given a specific treatment regime. No group differences in the ability to correctly predict the unseen plant's outcome were obtained. Alcoholics were significantly poorer than controls in isolating the relevant variable (chi 2 (1) = 8.24, p = 0.004). There were no sex differences in the ability to isolate the relevant variable. However, there was a sex effect in the number of irrelevant explanations (chi 2 (3) = 15.58, p = 0.001) with females producing more than males and female alcoholics more than any of the other three cells. These data suggest that (1) alcoholics may exhibit subtle abstraction deficits most readily observed in tasks examining process as opposed to final performance, (2) males and females differ in their response patterns regarding irrelevant material, and (3) further empirical study of the Plant Task may support its use in experimental and clinical settings.     

Predictors of neuropsychological impairment in seizure-free epilepsy patients

Persons with epilepsy are at increased risk of cognitive deficits as a result of various factors like etiology, structural brain lesions, seizure frequency, seizure type, age at onset of epilepsy, hereditary factors, psychosocial factors, and possible adverse effects of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). Despite the fact that the majority of epilepsy patients are seizure-free, previous studies on the relationship between epilepsy-related variables and cognitive function have mainly been conducted on patients with persisting seizures. In this study 158 adults with epilepsy on AED monotherapy and without epileptic seizures for at least 2 years were investigated with a neuropsychological test battery in addition to a neurological examination, MRI and EEG. The major findings were that the group had education and employment status similar to the population mean and neuropsychological function in the normal range. In the patient group without idiopathic generalized epilepsy known cerebral etiology was found to be a highly significant predictor of neuropsychological deficit. For patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy, early seizure debut at < or =18 years was a powerful predictor of neuropsychological impairment.     

Effects of tellurium ingestion on learning capacity of the rat

Chronic consumption of tellurium results in heavy deposits of the metal in neuronal lysosomes. Acute exposure to tellurium produces noticeable toxic reactions, and long-term exposure may produce pathological changes. Previous studies have reported only mild neurological symptoms, and it is unclear as to how much functional brain damage results from uptake of the metal. The present study found rats, which had been exposed to a tellurium diet for five months, to be severely impaired in their ability to learn a sequence of behavioral tasks. The learning deficits remained severe even after exposure to tellurium had been terminated for three months. The results suggest long-term disturbance of motivational as well as discriminative capacity as a result of neural impairment.This work was supported in part by Research Grant NB07961 from the National Institute of Health, Public Health Service.Denise Dru was the 1970 Adrian Summer Fellow of the Huntington Institute of Applied Medical Research.     

Moderate, Long-Term, Alcohol Consumption Potentiates Normal, Age-Related Spatial Memory Deficits in Rats

A modified "Samson" sucrose fading procedure was used to establish voluntary consumption of a 20% ethanol (EtOH) solution in male Sprague-Dawley rats for 18 consecutive months. Intakes were stable over the life span, and corresponded to the moderate to high levels of intake typically observed in human "social" drinkers and alcoholics. The Morris Water Maze (WM), Olton Radial Arm Maze (RM), and a "balance beam" test were used to assess the effects of alcohol and aging on spatial memory and motor function. Aged EtOH-consuming rats (AGED/ALC) demonstrated impaired task acquisition, relative to aged controls (AGED), not reaching criterion performance in either spatial memory task even when given four additional days of training. AGED/ALC rats scored significantly lower on percent correct out of the first eight arm entries, and committed more perseverative errors in the RM. There were no significant performance differences between AGED and AGED/ALC rats on a balance beam test of fine motor coordination and equilibrium, suggesting that deficits observed in the RM and WM were not related to differential motor functioning. These results demonstrated that long-term, moderate, oral self-administration of EtOH, within the range typically consumed by humans, had adverse effects on spatial memory in rats, and that such a pattern of EtOH consumption seemed to exacerbate the decline in cognitive functioning associated with normal aging.     

Improvement in Cognitive Functioning of Alcoholics Following Orthotopic Liver Transplantation

Cognitive functioning in alcoholic cirrhotics before and 1 year following orthotopic liver transplantation was compared with age- and sex-matched normal subjects. The alcoholic group improved significantly following transplantation on tests measuring psychomotor, visuopractic and abstracting abilities whereas the performance of normal controls remained virtually unchanged. In contrast, memory capacity in alcoholics with cirrhosis did not statistically improve following successful transplantation. Further investigation, using more sophisticated measures of memory function, are required to determine whether memory deficits are either associated with alcohol neurotoxicity or an irreversible component of hepatic encephalopathy. These findings suggest that a reversible hepatic encephalopathy underlies many of the neuropsychologic deficits observed in cirrhotic alcoholics and can be ameliorated following successful liver transplantation.     

Neurocognitive Deficits in Alcoholics and Social Drinkers: A Continuum?

Our research program has investigated neurocognitive deficits in sober alcoholics for several decades. We have shown that both male and female adult alcoholics – compared with peer nonalcoholic controls – have deficits on tests of learning, memory, abstracting, problem-solving, perceptual analysis and synthesis, speed of information processing, and efficiency. The deficits are equivalent to those found in patients with known brain dysfunction of a mild to moderate nature. Attempts to identify factors other than alcoholism to account for these differences have been unsuccessful. The deficits appear to remit slowly over 4 to 5 years. Relapse of recovering alcoholics is predicted by behavioral (e.g., depressive symptoms and neurocognitive performance) and biological measures (e.g., event-related potentials) obtained at the end of treatment. Results of recent studies support the hypothesis of a continuum of neurocognitive deficits ranging from the severe deficits found in Korsakoff patients to moderate deficits found in alcoholics and moderate to mild deficits in heavy social drinkers (more than 21 drinks/week). Individual differences in the presence and magnitude of neurocognitive deficits in social drinkers and alcoholics are hypothesized to be due, in part, to individual differences in vulnerability of the brain to alcohol or its metabolites' toxic effects.