Three points of interest lie in considering how Alzheimer, and more significantly Perusini, struggled to throw light on the cause of this devastating disease. There is a stimulating possibility that Perusini believed presenile forms of Alzheimer&#x2019;s disease described the same disease as senile forms. If so this would anticipate current opinion, and reveal Perusini to dissent from Kraepelin. In addition, Perusini may have understood the pathological relationship between neuritic plaques and vascular changes, once more foreseeing the modern view of Alzheimer&#x2019;s disease. Finally, Perusini and Alzheimer disagreed with Jung's view concerning the relationship between neuropathology and clinical psychiatry. This point highlights the major change occurring at that time from classical neurology to the psychoanalytic era. In his last work (1911) Alzheimer quoted his Italian disciple many times, even speaking of &#x2018;Perusini's cases&#x2019; (Perusinischen F&#xe4;lle). This article is an attempt to change the eponym of Alzheimer&#x2019;s disease into the Alzheimer-Perusini disease. This is a brief history of a master and his disciple, whose scientific lives were, by events, divided.

G. Macchi

C. Brahe

M. Pomponi

Alois Alzheimer and Gaetano Perusini: Should Man Divide What Fate United?

This report presents a syndrome resembling obsessive convulsive disorder (OCD) secondary to a stroke in the left basal ganglia. The patient's syndrome is virtually identical to those that have been described in bilateral damage of the basal ganglia. However, the stroke described in this case report is located unilaterally in the left basal ganglia. In addition, experience in treating a patient with OCD induced by structural damage of basal ganglia is presented.

Faustino Lopez-Rodriguez

Ibrahim Gunay

Nancy Glaser

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in a Woman with Left Basal Ganglia Infarct: A Case Report

The purpose of this experiment was to determine the sensitivity of wakefulness and paradoxical sleep to the &#x3b1;2-agonist, c1onidine. The drug inhibited both wakefulness and paradoxical sleep but the smallest dose necessary to inhibit wakefulness was 64 times larger than the smallest dose inhibiting paradoxical sleep. The effect on paradoxical sleep was inhibitory for all the clonidine doses but wakefulness was enhanced transiently after the four largest doses used. The time between injection and maximum wakefulness enhancement was highly correlated with the dose of c1onidine. The brain level measured after these four different doses at the moment of maximum wakefulness enhancement was the same, suggesting that this effect occurred only when a critical concentration of the drug was attained in the brain and not when the concentration was higher or lower. These data suggest that different &#x3b1;2-adrenoceptors are involved in these two states of vigilance or, alternatively, that their sensitivity is modulated physiologically. In addition, a sensitivity imbalance between different &#x3b1;2-adrenoceptors may exist in wakefulness but not in paradoxical sleep.

Z. de Saint Hilaire

F. Karege

J.-M. Gaillard

R. Blois

Differential Effects of an Alpha-2 Agonist on Wakefulness and Paradoxical Sleep in The Rat: A Polygraphic and Biochemical Approach

Two children (male, 10 years, and female, 13 years one month) with tumours of the inferior temporal (IT) cortex of the brain were studied post-surgically for their abilities to carry out a short-term memory test. This involved: differences in colour, number and shape of small plastic objects; differences in receptacles where these objects should be placed and in ways in which this placement should be done; a procedural task involving differences either in colour or in size of wooden rings employed in the task. Their performances in these tests, and those of patients with tumours of other encephalic areas, were compared with the performances of normal controls. The subjects with IT tumours spent a significantly greater amount of time than normal subjects of their age in carrying out the procedural task involving differences in colour. One of the IT subjects also spent a significantly greater amount of time in the procedural task involving size differences. Other differences in the performances of patients with encephalic tumours and the performances of normal controls were not significant. Results are discussed in relation to findings of colour and size perception and memory localized to the inferior temporal and middle temporal cortices.

E. Castro-Sierra

E. Paredes-D&#xed;az

J. A. Lazareff

Short-Term and Procedural Memory for Colours and Inferior Temporal Cortex Activity

A questionnaire was completed by 53 putative sufferers from Parkinson&#x2019;s disease and 31 putative age-matched normal controls. The aim of the questionnaire was to elicit reports of any changes in visual perception. The incidence of self-reported Parkinsonian symptoms was very much higher in the patient group than in the controls. The patients reported significantly more problems with depth and motion perception than the controls. They also reported a significantly higher incidence of hallucinations, double vision and the need to turn the head to see objects in the periphery. However, the reported incidence of changes in brightness, colour, shape and size perception was not significantly different in the two groups. The results are discussed with reference to laboratory studies of Parkinsonian vision and to the likely neurological basis of some of the changes.

Sally-Ann McDowell

John P. Harris

Visual Problems in Parkinson&#x2019;s Disease: A Questionnaire Survey

Visuospatial deficits in basal ganglia disease may be a non-specific function of the severity of dementia or they could reflect disease-specific impairments. To examine this question, Huntington (HD) patients, demented and non-demented Parkinson (PD) patients and healthy controls were examined with neuropsychological tests emphasising visuospatial abilities. Global intellectual function and general visuospatial cognition were less efficient in the two demented patient groups relative to both controls and non-demented PD patients and they did not differ significantly between non-demented Parkinsonians and controls nor between demented PD and HD patients. However, HD patients but not demented PD patients were impaired on a test of person-centred spatial judgement compared to non-demented subjects while demented PD patients scored significantly lower than HD patients on a test of field independence. Factor analysis yielded a factor reflecting general visuospatial processing capacity which discriminated between demented and non-demented PD patients but not between demented PD and HD patients. A unique factor associated with the manipulation of person-centred space discriminated between demented PD and HD patients. These results suggest general visuospatial processing is impaired as a non-specific function of dementia presence in HD and PD. Abnormalities in circumscribed aspects of visuospatial function, on the other hand, may differentiate between HD and PD, suggesting differential involvement of the basal ganglia in the respective illnesses.

Erich Mohr

Jules J. Claus

Pim Brouwers

Basal Ganglia Disease and Visuospatial Cognition: Are There Disease-Specific Impairments?

We investigated the effects of non-invasive high frequency (625Hz) stimulation over the spine on mechanical pain tolerance and subjective mood. Sixty healthy subjects were divided equally into three groups receiving either high intensity (250 V), low intensity (3&#x2013;4 V) or sham electrical stimulation directly over the spinal cord for 30 minutes. Following high intensity stimulation, subjects felt significantly more elated, leisurely and less tense and, contrary to reports on patients with clinical pain, had lower mechanical pain tolerances. There were no correlations between changes in mood and changes in mechanical pain tolerances. These findings contrasted with the lack of any significant differences in mood or mechanical pain tolerances in a second study where 20 subjects received either high intensity or sham stimulation across the left shoulder joint. The results indicate that decreases in mechanical pain tolerance are independent of changes in mood following non-invasive high frequency, high intensity cutaneous stimulation but that both effects are dependent on that stimulation being applied over the spine.

A. D. Towell

D. Williams

S. G. Boyd

High Frequency Non-Invasive Stimulation Over the Spine: Effects on Mood and Mechanical Pain Tolerance in Normal Subjects

Drawings by psychiatric patients were studied in various states (i) in depression; (ii) after neuroleptic injection; and (iii) during left hemisphere suppression induced by unilateral electroconvulsive seizure (UES). In these states, right hemisphere activation predominates. The results of the study demonstrate that, under the predominance of right hemisphere activation over the left hemisphere, there is a tendency to reproduce the image of the object and to represent it in near space. Drawings by psychiatric patients were also investigated in (i) the manic state; (ii) after injection of psychotropic drugs which improved the mood; and (iii) during right hemisphere suppression following right-sided UES. Under these conditions, left hemisphere activation predominates and the drawings loose the illusion of three-dimensional space. A tendency to reproduce the knowledge and the ideas of the object and to represent it in distant space was observed. Thus, both hemispheres may represent space and elaborate perceptive and conceptional models of the world in different ways. It is probable that different types of representation are based on global (right-hemispheric) in comparison with focal (left-hemispheric) attention to space.

N. N. Nikolaenko

A. Y. Egorov

E. A. Freiman

Representation Activity of The Right and Left Hemispheres of the Brain

This study was designed to investigate the nature and extent of executive impairments in medicated subjects with Parkinson's disease (PD) and matched control subjects. They performed two tasks involving strategic processing, deductive reasoning and memory updating. PD patients differed significantly from controls in solving two- and four-dimensional deductive reasoning problems, and they also showed impairment in memory updating. The findings are discussed in relation to previous studies which have shown deficits in strategic processing in PD.

Shelley Channon

Impairments in Deductive Reasoning and Working Memory in Parkinson&#x2019;s Disease

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Behavioural Neurology provides a platform for researchers and clinicians working in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, and neuropsychiatry.

Behavioural Neurology