Publications by authors named "Szendi Istvan"

The stability of brain functions is mainly determined by the energy management of the cells, and mental health is, therefore, profoundly affected by metabolic dysfunctions and immune and inflammatory processes. Research sheds light on more and more details and connections about the efficacy of diet and exercise, based on which we can develop effective metabolic interventions. The roots of this discipline, which is emerging today, go back to thousands of years of traditions and hundreds of years of documented observations.

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Human physical activity (HPA), a fundamental physiological signal characteristic of bodily motion is of rapidly growing interest in multidisciplinary research. Here we report the existence of hitherto unidentified hierarchical levels in the temporal organization of HPA on the ultradian scale: on the minute's scale, passive periods are followed by activity bursts of similar intensity ('quanta') that are organized into superstructures on the hours- and on the daily scale. The time course of HPA can be considered a stochastic, quasi-binary process, where quanta, assigned to task-oriented actions are organized into work packages on higher levels of hierarchy.

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(1) Background and Goal: Several studies have investigated the association of sleep, diurnal patterns, and circadian rhythms with the presence and with the risk states of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The goal of our study was to examine actigraphic measures to identify features that can be extracted from them so that a machine learning model can detect premorbid latent liabilities for schizotypy and bipolarity. (2) Methods: Our team developed a small wrist-worn measurement device that collects and identifies actigraphic data based on an accelerometer.

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Background: Cognitive impairment is a core feature of disorders on the schizophrenia-bipolar spectrum, i.e., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder.

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Actigraphic measurements are an important part of research in different disciplines, yet the procedure of determining activity values is unexpectedly not standardized in the literature. Although the measured raw acceleration signal can be diversely processed, and then the activity values can be calculated by different activity calculation methods, the documentations of them are generally incomplete or vary by manufacturer. These numerous activity metrics may require different types of preprocessing of the acceleration signal.

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Introduction: In Hungary, the use of music in rehabilitation is a scarcely researched area. In this study we aimed to examine the structure, purpose, and role of music activities conducted at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Szeged. We studied the rehabilitation programs of psychiatric patients and the role of music activities in healing and reintegration.

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The phenomenological and, consequently, pathophysiological heterogeneity of schizophrenia may be substantially decreased by determining etiologically valid subgroups. In a cross-sectional study, we analyzed the brain structural impairments of outpatients with schizophrenia using concurrent subgrouping methods, partly to enhance the extensity of exploration, and partly to estimate the validation of the divisions. High resolution T1-weighted MR images were obtained for 21 patients and 13 healthy controls.

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Executive system dysfunction and impaired prospective memory (PM) are widely documented in schizophrenia. However, it is not yet clarified which components of PM function are impaired in this disorder. Two plausible target components are the maintenance of delayed intentions and the execution of PM responses.

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Prospective memory is the ability to formulate and carry out actions at the appropriate time or in the appropriate context. This study aimed to identify the effect of hypnosis on prospective memory performance and to analyze the involvement of executive control processes in intention realization in a hypnotically altered state of consciousness. In 1 experiment, manipulating hypnotic instruction in a within-subject fashion, the authors explored the event-based prospective memory performance of 23 volunteers in 3 conditions: baseline, expectation, and execution.

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Background And Aims: Mental disorders with psychotic features are overlapping in many ways and there are a growing number of comparative studies in the last decades regarding this. Cognitive deficit is well underpinned in schizophrenia, but fewer studies are conducted in this area including patients with bipolar affective disorder. Therefore the aim of the present study was to investigate the cognitive performance of these two patient groups and healthy controls.

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Delirium is a complex syndrome caused most often by secondary neuronal dysfuncions due to systemic disorders. Because of the central nervous system manifestations of the general disease processes that are getting through the blood-brain barrier, the vigilance of attention flucutates and, therefore, the integration of incoming stimuli fails - resulting in inadequate behavioral answers. Delirium is one of the most common and serious complications of diseases, particularly in the elderly and patients in critical state.

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With the development of DSM-V and ICD-11 the definitions of psychiatric disorders are under re-evaluation. The emphasis is shifted from distinct disorders to clusters defined not only by symptomatology, but also by underlying neurobiology and cognitive deficits. Bipolar disorder I (BD-I) and schizophrenia (SZ) are of special interest since their differential diagnosis is often problematic and they partially overlap in measures ranging from genetics to neurophysiology.

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In a study of the linguistic processes involved in hypnosis, 22 volunteer medical students performed semantic and phonologic fluency tasks and then associative priming tests with 2 delay-lengths in waking alert and hypnotic conditions as well. The participants performed better during semantic than phonological fluency tests in alert and also in hypnotic states, and this difference was significantly greater in hypnosis. The increased semantic performance in hypnosis was accompanied by a decrease of the rule-offending errors.

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The description of the heterogeneous phenomenological, pathophysiological, and etiological nature of schizophrenia is under way; however, the relationships between heterogeneity levels are still unclear. We performed a robust cross-sectional study, including a systematic neuropsychological battery, assessment of clinical symptoms, neurological soft signs, morphogenetic anomalies and smell identification, and measurement of event-related potentials on 50 outpatients with schizophrenia in their compensated states. An explorative fuzzy cluster analysis revealed two subgroups in this sample that could be distinguished from each other on symptomatological, cognitive and neurological levels.

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The International Schizophrenia Outpatient Health Outcomes study, IC-SOHO is a three-year international observational study that investigates clinical and health outcomes of antipsychotic treatments. 7658 outpatients treated for schizophrenia were enrolled in the study, who needed an antipsychotic therapy to initiate or switch. The primary analysis compared the group taking olanzapine with the group taking any other antipsychotics, while the secondary comparison was performed between those treated with olanzapine and those with risperidone.

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A feature of schizophrenia is disrupted executive function leading to learning difficulties and memory problems. In two experiments we measured the ability of patients with schizophrenia to suppress irrelevant parts of acquired information by intentional (executive) and autonomic (non-executive) strategies. In the first experiment using directed forgetting by lists patients were found to be unable to intentionally suppress recently acquired episodic memories.

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This study was designed to investigate the relationship between abnormal neurological signs, visual contrast sensitivity, and the deficit syndrome of schizophrenia. Visual contrast sensitivity for counterphase-modulated low spatial frequency gratings was measured in 32 non-deficit and 12 deficit schizophrenia patients and 20 healthy controls subjects. Abnormal neurological signs were evaluated with the Neurological Evaluation Scale (NES).

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Thirteen male patients with schizophrenia and thirteen male normal control subjects were compared by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on volumes of the straight gyrus (SG), anterior cingulate gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, hippocampus, third ventricle, cavum septi pellucidi, total brain volume and intracranial volume. In addition, neuropsychological tasks were used to measure working memory and executive functions. Healthy volunteers and schizophrenic patients showed no significant differences in mean values for volumes of regions of interests.

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In this study, the authors investigated the relationship between the Ser9Gly (SG) polymorphism of the dopamine D3 receptor (DRD3) and striatal habit learning in healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia. Participants were given the weather prediction task, during which probabilistic cue-response associations were learned for tarot cards and weather outcomes (rain or sunshine). In both healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia, participants with Ser9Ser (SS) genotype did not learn during the early phase of the task (1-50 trials), whereas participants with SG genotype did so.

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Molecular components of the dopaminergic system may play an important role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated the relationship of the Ser9Gly (S/G) polymorphism of the dopamine D3 receptor (DRD3) and the variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) polymorphism of the dopamine transporter (DAT) with therapeutic response to atypical antipsychotics (clozapine, olanzapine, quetiapine, risperidone) and cognitive functions. No associations were found between the DRD3 and DAT polymorphisms and schizophrenia.

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Object: Numerous relevant variants of dopamine receptors have been identified in schizophrenia. The Ser9Gly gene polymorphism of dopamine D3 receptor is known as a susceptibility factor for the disease. In addition, it has a role in the modification of therapeutic effect of antipsychotics.

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