Relationships between auditory event-related potentials and mood state, medication, and comorbid psychiatric illness in patients with bipolar disorder.

Background: Patients with bipolar disorder (BD) exhibit aberrations in auditory event-related potentials (ERPs), although the relationships between these measures and mood state at testing, comorbid psychiatric illness, presence of psychotic features, and medication usage are unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between these factors and auditory ERP measures in BD patients.

Methods: An auditory 'oddball' discrimination task was used to elicit ERPs from 69 patients with type I BD and 52 healthy controls.

Cannabis use disrupts eyeblink conditioning: evidence for cannabinoid modulation of cerebellar-dependent learning.

While the cerebellum contains the highest density of cannabinoid receptor (CB1) in the brain, no studies have assessed the effect of exogenous cannabinoids on cerebellar-dependent learning in humans. The current study, therefore, examined the effect of chronic cannabis use on classical eyeblink conditioning (EBC), a cerebellar-mediated task which has been shown to be disrupted in CB1 knockout mice. Chronic cannabis users (24 h abstinence before study; positive THC urine drug test) free of DSM-IV Axis-I or -II disorders, were evaluated.