Impact of hypotension on cerebral perfusion during general anesthesia induction: A prospective observational study in adults.

Introduction: During anesthesia, decreases in mean arterial pressure (MAP) are common but the impact on possible cerebral hypoperfusion remains a matter of debate. We evaluated cerebral perfusion in patients with or without cardiovascular comorbidities (Hi-risk vs Lo-risk) during induction of general anesthesia and during hypotensive episodes.

Methods: Patients scheduled for neuroradiology procedure using standardized target-controlled Propofol-Remifentanil infusion were prospectively included.

Use of a sequencing task designed to stress the supervisory system in schizophrenic subjects.

Background: We investigated whether schizophrenic subjects are impaired in non-routine behaviour because of the dysfunction of a general executive component labelled, in neuropsychological terms, the supervisory system.

Methods: A specific verbal sequencing test was designed for this purpose. Subjects had to perform sequential reasoning with verbal material.

Verbal fluency in schizophrenia: The role of semantic clustering in category instance generation.

The aim of this study was to determine whether schizophrenic patients' impairment in semantic verbal fluency tasks is due to difficulties in organizing their search or, in other words, in organizing output in terms of clusters of meaningfully related words. Consecutive association of words belonging to subcategories of the semantic task was defined as semantic clustering. A categorical verbal fluency task was first administered to 100 healthy subjects and then to 22 schizophrenic patients and 22 healthy subjects matched for sex, age and education.

[Neurocognitive subtypes of schizophrenia according to performance at verbal fluency tasks].

Unlabelled: There is a general agreement that schizophrenia is an heterogeneous disorder and cognitive performances could be an interesting feature in order to allow a better description of specific subtypes. The aim of this study was: 1) to describe clinical and neuropsychological performances of 45 DSM IV schizophrenic patients divided in two groups according to their performances in verbal fluency task; 2) to compare each group with the performances of healthy subjects matched for sex, age and education.

Method: The differentiation criteria was the total number of words generated during 3 formal and 3 semantic fluency tasks.