Automatic semantic facilitation in Alzheimer's disease.

To explore the nature of semantic deficit in Alzheimer's disease patients (AD patients) we compared two tasks that are known to be very different with respect to the type of attentional demand and conscious effort they require: lexical decision (automatic) in a semantic priming paradigm and semantic relatedness judgements (intentional). In order to minimise post-lexical facilitation we devised a semantic priming experiment that met an automatic condition as much as possible, and we selected patients without severe word recognition deficits. AD patients showed reduced accuracy in the semantic relatedness judgements as compared to controls.

Early detection of bladder dysfunction following posterior urethral valves ablation.

Urinary incontinence following Posterior Urethral Valves (PUV) ablation has been attributed in the past to sphincter injury, but it is nowadays accepted that bladder dysfunction (BD) plays a determinant role. In order to assess BD evolution, we have evaluated, from 1982 to 1994, 48 boys with PUV by urodynamics (UD) studies. Age of the patients ranged from 10 months to 15 years.

Neurovesical dysfunction due to spinal dysraphism in anorectal anomalies.

Spinal dysraphism (SD) has been found associated with functional abnormalities of anorectal anomalies (ARA). The incidence of SD in these children is probably underestimated and a complete neuroradiological investigation of the lower urinary tract function has not been carried out routinely. In a 2 years time frame we performed urodynamic (UDS) evaluations on 14 patients (8 males and 6 females) with ARA who showed SD at Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies.

Letter dyslexia in a letter-by-letter reader.

We describe a letter-by-letter patient who produced misreading errors in both letters in isolation and in words. All errors were visual in nature. We hypothesized an access deficit to the abstract visual representation of letters that prevents letter identification.

Peripheral aspects of writing can be differentially affected by sensorial and attentional defect: evidence from a patient with afferent dysgraphia and case dissociation.

This study reports a patient with right posterior cerebral atrophy who was affected by afferent dysgraphia, characterised by case dissociation: cursive better than upper-case print. The patient also had severe visuocostructional deficit and simultanagnosia. The hypothesis advanced to explain this dissociation is that cases are not equally dependent on visual and kinaesthetic control.

Neuroanatomical correlates of category-specific semantic disorders: a critical survey.

Previous studies of category-specific semantic disturbances have focused their attention on the intrinsic cognitive structure of these disorders. The present survey aims to evaluate the relationships between disrupted semantic category and localisation of the underlying brain damage, in order to establish whether the injured brain areas house just those neurophysiological mechanisms that should have critically contributed to the acquisition of the disrupted semantic categories. We took into account in our review two double dissociations concerning respectively: (1) the impairment of a specific linguistic category--we contrast those disorders selectively affecting verbs (action names) with those selectively affecting nouns (object names); (2) the impairment of a specific conceptual/semantic domain--we contrast disorders selectively affecting living beings with those preferentially affecting man-made artefacts.

Hypothesis on the nature of comprehension deficit in a patient with transcortical mixed aphasia with preserved naming.

Patients with poor comprehension and preserved naming have been occasionally described. Such patients, who are affected by transcortical aphasia, have been taken as evidence of the possibility of naming an object while bypassing the semantic system. We describe a patient affected with mixed transcortical aphasia who presented a clear dissociation between ability in naming and difficulties in performing word-picture matching tasks.

Urinary continence in Müllerian duct anomalies.

Müllerian duct congenital anomalies such as Rokitansky-Mayer syndrome, Urogenital Sinus, Vaginal Atresia and Cloacal Malformation are relatively uncommon (1-5% of born female newborns). The complexity of these malformations has taken great interest regarding mainly the surgical procedure available for correction of genital abnormalities. However, the problem of urinary incontinence is still underestimated, and continence is often a goal difficult to achieve.

The incidence of occult spinal dysraphism and the onset of neurovesical dysfunction in children with anorectal anomalies.

The urological malformations associated with anorectal anomalies (ARA) are not only anatomical, but also functional, the latter being related to congenital neurovesical dysfunction (NVD). The true incidence of spinal dysraphism (SD) in these children is still unclear and is probably underestimated. The concept of caudal regression could explain its association with the anorectal anomalies.

The cerebellum contributes to linguistic production: a case of agrammatic speech following a right cerebellar lesion.

We describe a patient who, after a right cerebellar infarction, developed a right hemicerebellar syndrome and agrammatic speech without other cognitive impairments. We hypothesize that the cerebellum provides the temporal interplay among the neural structures underlying the processes responsible for production of sentences.

Evidence for a possible neuroanatomical basis for lexical processing of nouns and verbs.

Neuropsychological studies have revealed that brain-damaged patients may show impairments of specific word categories. This study reports the performance of three patients with impairments of the categories noun and verb. The first and second patients, with left frontal lobe atrophy, were impaired in naming and comprehension of verbs.

Disorders of verbal and pictorial memory in right and left brain-damaged patients.

It is still controversial whether verbal and pictorial stimuli are independently processed and stored in memory, as assumed by the dual code hypothesis, or a single code is used both for verbal and for pictorial stimuli, as assumed by the verbal loop hypothesis and by the propositional code hypothesis. According to the first hypothesis, verbal and pictorial memory are independently disrupted by brain damage, whereas according to the second hypothesis a co-occurrence of verbal and pictorial memory disorders are usually observed. To test these contrasting predictions, we constructed a verbal and a pictorial memory task very similar with respect to testing procedures and to material to be memorized and we administered them to 33 left and 27 right brain-damaged patients and to 21 normal controls.

Prosopagnosia can be associated with damage confined to the right hemisphere--an MRI and PET study and a review of the literature.

The early position that prosopagnosia is predominantly associated with right hemisphere (RH) injury was challenged by the finding that in practically all cases that come to autopsy pathological data point to bilateral damage. Yet the rejection of the RH hypothesis may have been too hasty. We report three prosopagnosic patients in whom MRI and CT documented a lesion confined to the right occipito-temporal areas and PET confirmed that hypometabolism involved the RH only.

[Administration of 5% +EMLA cream for local anesthesia in ambulatory pediatric surgery].

The use of local anaesthesia has been advocated by most pediatric surgeons in order to cut down hospitalization costs as well as to avoid general anaesthesia. In 1992, 26 patients aged 4 to 14 years (avg. 8 years) underwent small surgical procedures with local anesthesia, obtained by the application of EMLA cream 60 to 120 minutes prior to the procedure.

Category-specific deficits for grammatical classes of words: evidence for possible anatomical correlates.

Several neuropsychological studies have shown that brain-damaged patients may demonstrate category-specific deficits for grammatical classes of words, such as nouns and verbs. We describe 3 patients with selective impairments of these latter categories. The first patient, with marked atrophy of the left temporal lobe, was disproportionately impaired in naming and comprehension of nouns.

Can residual lexical knowledge concern word form rather than word meaning?

We described a patient with a dramatic deficit of both word comprehension and naming but with good preservation of visual pictorial semantics. On word-picture matching, his performances were slightly better than expected based on the observed lexical semantic disorder; in addition, the patient, who maintained good preservation of his underlying phonology, showed a tendency to point to the picture phonologically related to the target. In order to interpret these data, we advanced the hypothesis that the patient, in spite of his virtually complete inability to name, would be able, in a word-picture matching task, to "covertly" (i.

Myotonic dystrophy: an electrophysiological study of cognitive deficits.

Patients with Myotonic Dystrophy (MyD) frequently suffer from a dysfunction of the primary sensory pathways, as documented by abnormalities of short-latency evoked potentials. Impairment of intellectual functions has been less extensively investigated. Short-latency brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEPs) as well as long-latency auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 5 female and 6 male patients affected by MyD.

Dissociation between knowledge of living and nonliving things in dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Patients who survive herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE) sometimes present a category-specific disorder for living things. Since HSE specifically involves the temporolimbic structures of both hemispheres, these structures could play a critical role in processing and storing information about living things. If this were the case, a category-specific disorder for the same items should also be observed in the early stages of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) as the temporolimbic structures are often severely affected in this condition.

The influence of semantic and perceptual factors on lexical comprehension in aphasic and right brain-damaged patients.

We investigated whether the errors made by aphasic patients and right brain-damaged (RBD) patients on a word-picture matching test were differently related to the semantic and perceptual difficulties of the task. To this effect, the target picture was presented in one condition along with two semantically similar distractors, in another condition with two perceptually similar distractors, and in a third condition with two distractors that were both semantically and perceptually similar. There were also two control conditions in which part of targets that had been originally shown with semantic distractors were now presented with perceptual distractors and vice versa.

Variation in the pattern of omissions and substitutions of grammatical morphemes in the spontaneous speech of so-called agrammatic patients.

We describe the patterns of omissions (and substitutions) of freestanding grammatical morphemes and the patterns of substitutions of bound grammatical morphemes in 20 so-called agrammatic patients. Extreme variation was observed in the patterns of omissions and substitutions of grammatical morphemes, both in terms of the distribution of errors for different grammatical morphemes as well as in terms of the distribution of omissions versus substitutions. Results are discussed in the context of current debates concerning the possibility of a theoretically motivated distinction between the clinical categories of agrammatism and paragrammatism and, more generally, concerning the theoretical usefulness of any clinical category.

Anomia with and without lexical comprehension disorders.

Anomic patients are usually described as free from language comprehension disorders, but the status of lexical comprehension in anomia is still controversial. Most anomic patients are impaired on tasks of semantic-lexical discrimination, but some of them do not present clear signs of semantic-lexical deficit at the receptive level. The aim of the present research was to elucidate the nature of word-finding disturbances by contrasting results obtained by anomic patients with and without lexical comprehension disorders on a number of variables, namely severity of anomia, implicit knowledge of words that patients failed to name, presence of verbal-semantic paraphasias, and scores obtained on a test of phoneme discrimination and on the "Token Test.

Mechanisms of unilateral spatial neglect in relation to laterality of cerebral lesions.

An Overlapping Figures test, considered as appropriate to study focusing of attention on small but complex stimuli falling in the central parts of visual field and a Searching for Animals test, designed to study the exploration of large parts of extrapersonal space, were administered to 38 controls, and 90 right and 82 left brain-damaged patients. The investigation was designed to test the hypothesis that the extent of space to be explored may have a different influence on unilateral spatial neglect of right and left brain-damaged patients. Both right and left brain-damaged patients showed an asymmetric exploration of space on the Searching for Animals test, making more omissions on the side contralateral to the damaged hemisphere than on the ipsilateral one.

Disorders of classificatory activity in aphasia.

Two nonverbal tasks of classificatory activity ("class inclusion" and "class intersection") were administered to 46 aphasics, 28 normal controls, 19 nonaphasic left-brain-damaged and 17 right-hemisphere-damaged patients in order to study if aphasic patients are more impaired than nonaphasic brain-damaged patients on these two tasks of elementary logic and if a relationship exists within the aphasic patients between inability to perform the tasks of classifiactory activity and impairment of the semantic-lexical level of integration of language. Results were for the most part in line with expectations because aphasics scored worse than normal controls and nonaphasic brain-damaged patients (even if the difference reached the level of statistical significance only on the test of "class intersection") and within the aphasic patients the worst results were obtained by subjects presenting clear signs of semantic-lexical disintegration.

Molecular forms of cholinesterases in CSF of Alzheimer's disease/senile dementia of Alzheimer type patients and matched neurological controls.

Acetylcholinesterase, pseudocholinesterase and their molecular forms were measured in the CSF of patients affected by Alzheimer's disease and of matched neurological controls. Three different molecular forms of ChE were found in the CSF of both groups of patients, but only two of them belonged to 'true' AChE. No differences were found between Alzheimer's disease patients and neurological controls in all the examined parameters.