This study takes advantage of continuing advances in the precision of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to quantify hippocampal volumes in a series of human subjects with a history of depression compared with controls. We sought to test the hypothesis that both age and duration of past depression would be inversely and independently correlated with hippocampal volume. A sample of 24 women rangin...

In 1908 Diefendorf and Dodge reported an association between schizophrenia and impaired smooth pursuit eye movements. Using a pendulum as a stimulus and photographing corneal reflection of light, they monitored eye movements in chronic schizophrenics, manic-depressives, epileptics, and mentally retarded patients. Deviant pursuit movements characterized the performance of most of the schizophren...

OBJECTIVE The Wisconsin Test Card Sorting Test (WCST) is a neuropsychological test that has been suggested as a more specific test for frontal lobes dysfunctions. This study was designed to determine whether WCST is able to differentiate between Iranian psychiatric patients with cognitive disorders and normal subjects, and whether WCST scores are related to severity of symptoms in depressive an...

Schizophrenics, manics, depressives and normal subjects (15 in each group) were tested for their ability to understand and express the prosodic quality of speech. Sentences in which one word was stressed (stress prosody comprehension) or in which a particular emotion was conveyed (emotional prosody comprehension) were taped and played to subjects to test their comprehension. Subjects were then ...

One definition of atypical depression has emphasized the reversed vegetative symptoms (hypersomnia and hyperphagia) (Aarons et al 1985) in the context of a nonendogenous (or mood reactive) depressive state (Ravaris et al 1980). This clinical picture overlaps with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) (Rosenthal et ai 1984), which is a syndrome of recurrent depressions associated with fatigue, hyper...

Findings on depressive patients indicate that depressives have electrophysiological characteristics similar to those of schizophrenics, in that they exhibit reduced Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) amplitudes and more distinct Postimperative Negative Variations (PINVs) than normal controls. In a biofeedback experiment, 8 medicated male inpatients with the DSM III-R diagnosis of "Bipolar Diso...

Psychiatric evaluation and assessment of common physical illnesses and disabilities was carried out in elderly depressives (aged 60 years and above). Correlation, if any, was seen between depression and physical problems. The 'patient group' comprised of 40 drawn from MHI, Cuttack, having a depressive disorder (ICD-10). The 'control group' of 20 was drawn from the general population with no psy...