The Clinician's Subjective Experience during the Interaction with Adolescent Psychiatric Patients: Validity and Reliability of the Assessment of Clinician's Subjective Experience.

Introduction: The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in the clinician's subjectivity and its role in the diagnostic assessment. Integrating the criteriological, third-person approach to patient evaluation and psychiatric diagnosis with other approaches that take into account the patient's subjective and intersubjective experience may bear particular importance in the assessment of very young patients. The ACSE (Assessment of Clinician's Subjective Experience) instrument may provide a practical way to probe the intersubjective field of the clinical examination; however, its reliability and validity in child and adolescent psychiatrists seeing very young patients is still to be determined.

Loss in grey matter in a small network of brain areas underpins poor reactive inhibition in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patients.

Reactive inhibition correlates with the severity of symptoms in paediatric patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) though not in those with Tourette syndrome (TS). Here we assessed whether structural alterations in both grey (GM) and white matter (WM) volumes correlate with a measure of reactive inhibition, i.e.

Inhibition is impaired in children with obsessive-compulsive symptoms but not in those with tics.

Background: Impaired inhibitory control is thought to be a core deficit in psychiatric disorders where patients exhibit problems with controlling urges. These problems include the urge to perform movements typical of Tourette syndrome and the urge to execute compulsive actions typical of obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, the picture emerging from studies that address this issue is controversial.

Neurophysiological correlate of emotional regulation in cognitive and motor deficits in Tourette's syndrome.

The present study investigated the role of different emotions in the expression of cognitive and motor control abilities of children having Tourette's syndrome (TS) compared to healthy controls. The electroencephalography activity of 33 children (mean age in final sample: TS ( = 10) = 10.5 ± 2.

Headache and sleep in children.

Several scientific studies report a close relationship between sleep and headache: sleep changes may reflect the onset and increase of both duration and frequency of headache attacks. Variations in sleep architecture, together with a poor sleep hygiene in children, may indeed be responsible for the onset of headache and its development into a chronic disease. For a correct clinical management of children with headache, it is therefore fundamental to investigate their sleep habits, architecture and potential disturbances, in order to develop adequate therapeutic plans for both sleep and headache.

Controlled-release melatonin, singly and combined with cognitive behavioural therapy, for persistent insomnia in children with autism spectrum disorders: a randomized placebo-controlled trial.

Although melatonin and cognitive-behavioural therapy have shown efficacy in treating sleep disorders in children with autism spectrum disorders, little is known about their relative or combined efficacy. One hundred and sixty children with autism spectrum disorders, aged 4-10 years, suffering from sleep onset insomnia and impaired sleep maintenance, were assigned randomly to either (1) combination of controlled-release melatonin and cognitive-behavioural therapy; (2) controlled-release melatonin; (3) four sessions of cognitive-behavioural therapy; or (4) placebo drug treatment condition for 12 weeks in a 1 : 1 : 1 : 1 ratio. Children were studied at baseline and after 12 weeks of treatment.

[Autistic dimension in obsessive-compulsive disorder in adolescence].

Aim: This study examines the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with normal and poor insight of illness and it detects the presence of autistic traits. The aim is to establish the relationship between OCD and Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD): comorbidity or subtype of OCD?

Methods: The sample consists of 48 adolescents (aged 12-18) with a clinical diagnosis of OCD (according DSM-IV-TR). After administering the Children's Yale Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (CYBOCS) and the Brown Assessement Beliefs Scale (BABS), the sample is divided into two groups according to insight of illness.