Alcoholism and dampened temporal limbic activation to emotional faces.

Background: Excessive chronic drinking is accompanied by a broad spectrum of emotional changes ranging from apathy and emotional flatness to deficits in comprehending emotional information, but their neural bases are poorly understood.

Methods: Emotional abnormalities associated with alcoholism were examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging in abstinent long-term alcoholic men in comparison to healthy demographically matched controls. Participants were presented with emotionally valenced words and photographs of faces during deep (semantic) and shallow (perceptual) encoding tasks followed by recognition.

Comparison of image quality between conventional and low-dose nonenhanced head CT.

Background And Purpose: Increasing use of CT for evaluating neurologic disease may expose patients to considerable levels of ionizing radiation. We compared the image quality of low-mAs head CT scans with that of conventional nonenhanced scans.

Methods: Conventional head CT scans were obtained in 20 patients (all >65 years with history of non-CNS malignancy) by using a multidetector technique: 170 mA and 1-second scanning time (ie, 170 mAs), 140 kVp, table speed of 7.