Nelson M Butters

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether polygraphic sleep recordings, obtained at the time of admission to an inpatient alcohol treatment program, predict abstinence and relapse 3 months following hospital discharge in nondepressed patients with primary alcoholism.

DESIGN: Two independent, consecutive cohorts of patients (group 1, n = 28; group 2, n = 17) underwent all-night polygraphic sleep recordings and other clinical evaluations during the first and fourth weeks of a 1-month inpatient ...

OBJECTIVE: To establish population-based data, with special emphasis on the effects of age, gender, and education, for eight, widely used neuropsychological tests in a community-dwelling cohort of normal and cognitively impaired older adults.

DESIGN: A population-based observational study.

SETTING: Examinations were performed in a research clinic by specially trained staff during a 1988-1992 evaluation for osteoporosis.

PARTICIPANTS: 1,692 community-dwelling subjects, aged 55 to 94 ...

The corpus striatum serves a critical function in inhibiting involuntary, intrusive movements. Striatal degeneration in Huntington's disease results in a loss of motor inhibition, manifested by abnormal involuntary choreiform movements. Sensorimotor inhibition, or "gating", can be measured in humans using the startle reflex: the startle reflex is normally inhibited when the startling stimulus is preceded 30-500 ms earlier by a weak prepulse. In the present study, prepulse inhibition ...

The performances of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), patients with Huntington's disease (HD), and demented and nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were compared on 2 tests of implicit memory that do not require the conscious recollection of prior study episodes: (1) a pursuit-rotor motor learning task and (2) a lexical priming test. The HD patients were found to be impaired on the motor learning but not the lexical priming task, whereas the DAT patients ...

OBJECTIVE: To compare the memory performances of nondemented older adults with and without the epsilon 4 allele of the apolipoprotein E (APOE-epsilon 4).

BACKGROUND: Few studies have examined the cognitive status of subjects at high risk for the development of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). A newly reported risk factor for DAT allows for an examination of the cognitive performances of nondemented subjects who are at risk by virtue of being either heterozygous or homozygous for the ...

Our earlier studies using the Consortium to Establish a Registry of Alzheimer's Disease neuropsychological battery showed that delayed recall was a highly sensitive indicator of early Alzheimer's disease. None of the learning and memory measures in the battery were found to be useful in staging the severity of this form of dementia. This study explores the nonmemory functions (fluency, naming, and praxis) of the Consortium to Establish a Registry of Alzheimer's Disease battery and asks ...

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the hypothesis that the memory disorders of Huntington's Disease (HD) patients are characterized by deficiencies in both retrieval mechanisms and the acquisition of procedural (skill-based) information. In the first study, verbal recall and recognition tests were administered to HD patients, amnesics and normal control (NC) subjects. Although the two patient groups were impaired relative to NC subjects on both recall and recognition of word ...

Patients with Huntington's disease (HD), patients with alcoholic Korsakoff's syndrome, and normal control subjects were compared on tests of skill learning (mirror reading) and verbal recognition. Like previously reported results, the patients with Korsakoff's syndrome acquired the mirror-reading skill at a normal rate but were severely impaired in their recognition of the words used on the mirror-reading task. In contrast to the amnesic patients, the demented patients with HD were ...

The efferent cortical projections of the prefrontal cortex were studied in rhesus monkeys using silver impregnation techniques. The projections from the prefrontal cortex are directed, in general, to the temporal, parietal and limbic (cingulate) cortex. However, different sectors of the prefrontal cortex, in particular the principal sulcus, show preferences for specific cortical regions (Fig. 4). The rostral part of the principal sulcus sends limited projections to the cingulate gyrus ...

Two investigations concerned with the memory deficits of patients with Huntington's Disease (HD) were performed. In the first experiment, early and advanced HD patients showed superior recognition memory than did alcoholic Korsakoff patients on modified recall and recognition forms of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. In contrast, on a letter fluency test (FAS) requiring the patients to search their semantic memories, both HD groups produced fewer correct words and perseveration ...

In this investigation, the efferent cortico-cortical projections of the orbitofrontal cortex in the rhesus monkey have been investigated using silver impregnation methods. Projections from this area were observed to terminate in the rostral portions of the temporal lobe (areas TA, TE and TG) and cingulate gyrus (area 24), the insular cortex, and some dorsolateral prefrontal areas. Although these connections characterized all areas, with the exception of Walker's area 14 and Bonin and ...

Episodic (recall of passages) and semantic (letter and category fluency) memory tasks were administered to Alzheimer's Disease (early stages), Huntington's Disease (HD), and alcoholic Korsakoff patients matched for overall severity of dementia. Although all three patient groups were severely (and equally) impaired on memory for passages, only the Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients emitted numerous intrusion errors. On the fluency tasks, the performance of the mild Alzheimer patients was ...

To test the idea that scopolamine provides a suitable pharmacological model of the memory defects associated with cortical or subcortical dementias, we assessed memory on a battery of tasks in healthy young normal subjects who received 0.5 mg scopolamine, 0.1-0.2 mg glycopyrrolate or physiological saline, once each on three separate occasions, and compared the pattern of memory failure induced by scopolamine to that observed on the same tasks in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or ...