Overconfidence in incorrect perceptual judgments in patients with schizophrenia.

Background: Patients with schizophrenia show overconfidence in memory and social cognition errors. The present investigation examined whether this cognitive distortion also manifests in perceptual tasks.

Methods: A total of 55 individuals with schizophrenia, 58 with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as well as 45 non-clinical controls were presented 24 blurry black and white pictures, half of which contained a hidden object; the other half contained ("snowy") visual noise.

Prevalence of dyspepsia: the epidemiology of overlapping symptoms.

Studies of the epidemiology of dyspepsia have been complicated by the use of different symptom definitions, subject populations and time frames of investigation. Published figures for the prevalence of dyspepsia vary from 20% to 40%, of which perhaps only a quarter can be attributed to peptic ulcer disease. General practitioners see only a fraction of the dyspepsia within the community, the majority of which is either ignored or treated by self-medication.

Symptom complaints, psychiatric disorder and abnormal illness behaviour in patients with upper abdominal pain.

Seventy patients presenting to the gastroenterologist with upper abdominal pain were examined by a psychiatrist to establish the presence of psychiatric disorder, illness behaviour and to record in detail their symptom pattern. The 37 patients who had no organic cause for their abdominal complaints were subdivided into those with and without psychiatric disorder. The former (21 patients) demonstrated more illness behaviour, they complained of more abdominal symptoms and their pain was both more severe and more persistent than in the patients with organic disease and those with non-organic illness who did not have psychiatric disorder.

Quantitation of tryptic responses to endogenous and exogenous stimulation in chronic pancreatitis.

Using validated double-marker techniques to quantitate tryptic secretion we found that the mean 10-min output of trypsin in duodenal juice after a test meal was very similar to the peak 10-min output of trypsin after pancreozymin (2 Crick-Harper-Raper units/kg, Boots) both in controls as well as in non-diabetic patients with idiopathic chronic pancreatitis. These results show that the disproportionate reduction in mean tryptic activity after endogenous compared with exogenous stimulation in chronic pancreatitis is not due to impaired release of cholecystokinin-pancreozymin from the small intestine, nor to refractoriness of the pancreas to endogenously released hormone: instead, it is due to overdilution of secreted pancreatic enzymes because of accelerated gastric emptying, with or without gastric acid hypersecretion.

Metabolism of vitamin D in patients with primary biliary cirrhosis and alcoholic liver disease.

The metabolism of isotopically labelled vitamin D2 and D3 has been investigated in eight patients with primary biliary cirrhosis and in five controls. The concentration of labelled vitamin D2 was lower than that of vitamin D3 in serum of patients with primary biliary cirrhosis on days 1 and 2 after intravenous injection (P less than 0.005 and P less than 0.