Unusual course of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in a patient treated with chemotherapy for gastric cancer.

Most aortic aneurysms have a degenerative genesis and show a slow expansion over years. Only a few patients with a rapid progression of mycotic or inflammatory aneurysm during some weeks or months have been reported. We report a patient with a rapidly growing symptomatic infrarenal aneurysm with a maximal diameter of 53 mm, which developed over a 5-month period from a normal aorta and did not feature typical signs of degenerative, inflammatory, or mycotic aneurysm.

Sustained attention and planning deficits but intact attentional set-shifting in neuroleptic-naïve first-episode schizophrenia patients.

Introduction: The nature of deficits in tests of sustained attention, planning and attentional set-shifting has not been investigated in neuroleptic-naïve first-episode (FE) schizophrenia patients. Based on previous literature of chronic and medicated FE schizophrenia patients, we predicted that the neuroleptic-naïve patients would show deficits in these cognitive processes.

Methods: Twenty-nine neuroleptic-naïve FE schizophrenia patients and 33 healthy controls - matched by age, gender, and nicotine consumption - performed 3 tests from the Cambridge Automated Neuropsychological Test Battery (CANTAB) thought to measure these cognitive processes: the Rapid Visual Information Processing task (RVIP, sustained attention), the Stockings of Cambridge task (SOC, planning), and the Intradimensional/Extradimensional set-shifting task (IDED, attention shifting).

Decision-making dysregulation in first-episode schizophrenia.

Studies with chronic schizophrenia patients have demonstrated that patients fluctuate between rigid and unpredictable responses in decision-making situations, a phenomenon which has been called dysregulation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether schizophrenia patients already display dysregulated behavior at the beginning of their illness. Thirty-two first-episode schizophrenia or schizophreniform patients and 30 healthy controls performed the two-choice prediction task.

Rapid visual information processing in schizophrenic patients: the impact of cognitive load and duration of stimulus presentation. A pilot study.

The inability to sustain attention has been proposed as a core deficit in schizophrenia. The Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT) and the Rapid Visual Information Processing Task (RVP) are widely used neuropsychological tasks to measure sustained attention. The RVP displays numbers as stimuli, whereas the AX-CPT uses letters.

Information-processing deficits and cognitive dysfunction in panic disorder.

Objective: The plasticity of the startle reflex, including prepulse inhibition (PPI) and habituation, provides operational measures of information processing that are abnormal in several neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by deficits in suppression or inhibition of intrusive or irrelevant stimuli. Clinically, patients with panic disorder (PD) have been described as having difficulties in the inhibition of their response to sensory and cognitive events. Because such difficulties may be the result of failures in early stages of information processing, we hypothesized that startle reactivity, PPI and habituation are deficient in unmedicated patients with PD.

Decision-making strategies by panic disorder subjects are more sensitive to errors.

Background: Decision-making is a complex process, which can be assessed experimentally by the two-choice prediction task. Error-rate, i.e.

The acoustic startle reflex and its modulation: effects of age and gender in humans.

The acoustic startle reflex and its modulation by prepulse inhibition (PPI) and habituation are used in many studies in different fields of neuropsychiatric research. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of age and gender on PPI, startle magnitude, and habituation in healthy human volunteers. Twenty-seven male and 28 female participants of four different age groups (range: 20-60 years) were investigated in an acoustic startle paradigm using a startle stimulus of 115 dB and a prepulse of 86 dB (16 dB over the white noise background) with five different lead intervals (30, 60, 120, 240, and 2000 ms).