Occupational therapy and pulmonary rehabilitation of disabled COPD patients.

Background: Occupational therapy (OT) has been defined as a task of rehabilitation for disabled patients, giving them maximal function and independence to sustain specific activities of daily living.

Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of OT as an adjunctive measuring during pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) of hospitalized COPD patients.

Methods: A prospective clinical trial with parallel groups was undertaken in severely disabled COPD patients (n = 71, age 73 +/- 5 years).

Further evidence for a possible association between serotonin transporter gene and lithium prophylaxis in mood disorders.

We previously reported an association between the functional polymorphism in the upstream regulatory region of the serotonin transporter gene (SERTPR) and the prophylactic efficacy of lithium in a sample of 201 Italian subjects affected by Mood disorders. The aim of the present study was to replicate analyses on an independent sample. In total, 83 subjects affected by Bipolar disorder were recruited in the Mood Disorders Clinic of the Eginition Hospital of the Athens University, Medical School Department of Psychiatry.

Voice onset time encoding in patients with left and right cochlear implants.

Stop-consonant discrimination was investigated in normal-hearing listeners and cochlear-implanted patients (CIP) by recording auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) to /b epsilon/ and /p epsilon/ syllables. This study demonstrates that: (i) AEPs show time-locked components that mimic the temporal structure of the stimuli, indicating that both patients and control subjects encode those syllables according to the temporal cue (voice onset time) characterizing the voiced/voiceless contrast; (ii) the side of implantation does not affect the general structure of AEPs and /b epsilon/-/p epsilon/ discrimination thresholds (measured separately with a psychophysical procedure); (iii) poor time-locking to the syllables' temporal structure is associated with poor discrimination. This suggests that EEG investigation of temporal-processing provides an objective index of speech perception in CIP and could be used in implanted children.

Temporal envelope processing in the human left and right auditory cortices.

The goal of this study was to determine the temporal response properties of different auditory cortical areas in humans. This is achieved by recording the phase-locked neural activity to white noises modulated sinusoidally in amplitude (AM) at frequencies between 4 and 128 Hz, in the left and right cortices of 20 subjects. Phase-locked neural responses are recorded in four auditory cortical areas with intracerebral electrodes, and modulation transfer functions (MTFs) are computed from these responses.

Identification of envelope-expanded sentences in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.

The present study examined the effects of temporal-envelope expansion on speech perception. Sentence identification performance was measured in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners for stationary and fluctuating noise. Two expansion schemes were used to increase the depth of the slow (< 16 Hz) and fast (< 256 Hz) amplitude fluctuations of the stimuli.

New antipsychotics and schizophrenia: a review on efficacy and side effects.

The first compounds showing efficacy in the treatment of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders was chlorpromazine, an anti-histaminic compound casually observed to possess antipsychotic effects. The discovery of the real mechanism of action of antipsychotic substances dates back to the 1960s, when researchers found that these compounds act as dopamine receptor antagonists. Unfortunately, this type of drugs cannot block the D2 receptors only in the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway (which mediates their therapeutic effects), because of their non-selective D2 receptor blockage in both the mesolimbic and striatal regions, and the consequent appearance of side effects related to striatal interaction in the same dosage range as is needed for the therapeutical effects.

Serotonin transporter 5HTTLPR polymorphism and affective disorders: no evidence of association in a large European multicenter study.

The available data from preclinical and pharmacological studies on the role of the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) support the hypothesis that a dysfunction in brain serotonergic system activity contributes to the vulnerability to affective disorders (AD). 5-HTT is the major site of serotonin reuptake into the presynaptic neuron, and it has been shown that the polymorphic repeat polymorphism in the 5-HTT promotor region (5-HTTLPR) may affect gene-transcription activity. 5-HTT maps to chromosome 17 at position 17q11.

A single nucleotide polymorphism in glycogen synthase kinase 3-beta promoter gene influences onset of illness in patients affected by bipolar disorder.

Genetic studies in medicine exploited age of onset as a criterion to delineate subgroups of illness. Bipolar patients stratified with this criterion were shown to share clinical characteristics and patterns of inheritance of illness. The molecular mechanisms driving the biological clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus may play a role in mood disorders.

Neuropsychological outcome in children with optic pathway tumours when first-line treatment is chemotherapy.

Standard treatment of optic pathways gliomas consists of radiotherapy and surgery when feasible. Owing to the toxicity of irradiation, chemotherapy has emerged as an interesting therapeutic option, especially in young children. This study describes the neuropsychological profile of 27 children (aged between 1.

Influence of CLOCK gene polymorphism on circadian mood fluctuation and illness recurrence in bipolar depression.

Recent studies showed that a polymorphism (T to C nucleotide substitution) in the 3' flanking region of the human CLOCK gene is associated with diurnal preferences of human healthy subjects, with higher "eveningness" in subjects carrying at least one copy of the C allele. We investigated the possible role of CLOCK gene polymorphism in the regulation of diurnal mood fluctuations during a major depressive episode. Sample (n = 101) was collected, in the context of previously reported trials, among patients affected by bipolar disorder type I, depressive episode without psychotic features, free of psychotropic medications.

Antidepressant effects of light therapy combined with sleep deprivation are influenced by a functional polymorphism within the promoter of the serotonin transporter gene.

Background: A functional polymorphism within the promoter of the serotonin transporter has been shown to influence the antidepressant response to serotonergic drug treatments and to total sleep deprivation (TSD). The short-term relapse that follows acute response to TSD has been successfully prevented by combining TSD with light therapy. The mechanism of action of this combined treatment is unknown.

Genetic dissection of psychopathological symptoms: insomnia in mood disorders and CLOCK gene polymorphism.

We investigated the possible effect of the 3111T/C CLOCK gene polymorphism on sleep disorders in a sample of 620 patients affected by major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BP). We detected a significantly higher recurrence of initial (P = 0.0001), middle (P = 0.

Gene-environment interaction in psychiatric disorders as indicated by season of birth variations in tryptophan hydroxylase (TPH), serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) and dopamine receptor (DRD4) gene polymorphisms.

Genetic and environmental factors, as well as their interactions, are likely to be involved in psychiatric disorders. Considerable progress has been made in association and linkage studies with various candidate genes, at times with conflicting or ambiguous results. An environmental factor that has persistently shown associations with several psychiatric and neurological disorders is the season of birth.

Dopamine receptor D2 and D3 gene variants are not associated with the antidepressant effect of total sleep deprivation in bipolar depression.

Total sleep deprivation (TSD) is an effective treatment for mood disorders that is thought to act through an enhancement in several neurotransmitter pathways including dopaminergic transmission. Genetic factors are likely to play a major role in determining individual differences in TSD response. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of dopamine receptor D3 (DRD3) and dopamine receptor D2 (DRD2) variants on TSD antidepressant efficacy in bipolar disorder.

Multicentre Italian family-based association study on tyrosine hydroxylase, catechol-O-methyl transferase and Wolfram syndrome 1 polymorphisms in mood disorders.

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate tyrosine hydroxylase, catechol-O-methyl transferase and Wolfram syndrome 1 genes in mood disorders using a family-based association approach.

Methods: The sample included 134 nuclear mood disorder families, with subjects affected by bipolar disorder (n=103) or major depressive disorder (n=58). All subjects were genotyped using polymerase chain reaction techniques.

Effect of cochlear damage on the detection of complex temporal envelopes.

Recent studies have demonstrated that the detection of complex temporal envelopes relies - at least partially - on the perception of a distortion component generated by a peripheral (cochlear) and/or central (post-cochlear) non-linearity. In the present study, first- and second-order amplitude modulation (AM) detection thresholds were obtained in normally hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners using a 2-kHz pure-tone carrier. In both groups of listeners, first-order AM detection thresholds were measured for AM rates fm ranging between 4 and 87 Hz, and second-order AM detection thresholds were measured for second-order AM rates fm' ranging between 4 and 23 Hz, using a fixed first-order 'carrier' AM rate fm of 64 Hz.

Effect of a noise modulation masker on the detection of second-order amplitude modulation.

Amplitude modulation waveforms can contain complex patterns of modulation frequency and depth that are characteristic of many biologically relevant sounds. To investigate the mechanisms involved in the processing of such patterns, we measured detection thresholds for second-order amplitude modulation (AM), a sinusoidal AM in which AM depth varies with time at frequency f(m)'. Second-order AM generates sidebands in the modulation spectrum on either side of the frequency components introduced by the first-order AM.

SSRIs antidepressant activity is influenced by G beta 3 variants.

The aim of the present study was to test a possible effect of the G-protein beta3-subunit (Gbeta3) C825T gene variant on the antidepressant activity of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in a sample of major and bipolar depressives, with or without psychotic features. Four hundred and ninety inpatients were treated with fluvoxamine 300 mg/day (n=362) or paroxetine 40 mg/day (n=128) and either placebo or pindolol in a double-blind design for 6 weeks. The severity of depressive symptoms was weekly assessed with the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression.

Human nuclear transcription factor gene CREM: genomic organization, mutation screening, and association analysis in panic disorder.

Panic disorder is an anxiety disorder with an estimated heritability of 48%. Variation in the gene of the nuclear transcription factor "cAMP-responsive element modulator" (CREM) might contribute to its pathogenesis. CREM knock-out mice exhibit significantly less anxiety behavior than wild-type mice and the alternative CREM gene product "inducible cAMP early repressor" (ICER) plays a pivotal role in the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is disturbed in panic disorder.

Predictors of change in exercise capacity after comprehensive COPD inpatient rehabilitation.

Background: In order to evaluate the factors associated with change in exercise capacity after comprehensive inpatient Pulmonary Rehabilitation (IPR) we studied 132 consecutive adults with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) recovering from an acute exacerbation.

Material/methods: Lung function, arterial blood gases, and respiratory muscle strength were measured at baseline. Perceived breathlessness (B), 6-minute walk distance (6MWD), dyspnea at rest and post-exertion (D), hospital anxiety and depression (HAD), and health-related quality of life were assessed before (T0) and after (T1) IPR.

Temporal envelope perception in dyslexic children.

Speech intelligibility depends heavily on the accurate perception of auditory temporal envelope cues, that is the slower amplitude modulations present in the speech waveform. In a previous study, McAnally and Stein demonstrated that dyslexics may show impaired audibility (i.e.