Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology
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J Clin Exp Neuropsychol · Apr 1996
Cognitive function in patients with sleep apnea after acute nocturnal nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment: sleepiness and hypoxemia effects.
Patients with sleep apnea are typically hypersomnolent during the daytime and may demonstrate higher order cognitive dysfunction. A persistent problem in interpreting impaired neuropsychological test performance in such patients is whether the observed deficits can be explained wholly by impaired vigilance. We examined 37 sleep apnea patients prior to and immediately subsequent to successful sleep apnea treatment with nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). ⋯ Thus, performance on the recall trial of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test increased from pre-CPAP to post-CPAP for the increased alertness group but decreased significantly for the decreased alertness group. On the Wilkinson Addition Test, non-hypoxemic patients showed statistically significant improvement in problems correctly solved from pre-CPAP to post-CPAP, but the hypoxemic patients showed only a marginal increase. These results are compatible with other studies suggesting that patients having sleep apnea may incur deficits as a result of both decreased vigilance and hypoxemia, and that at least some of these deficits are immediately reversible.
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J Clin Exp Neuropsychol · Oct 1995
Case ReportsDense amnesia in a professional musician following herpes simplex virus encephalitis.
We describe the memory functioning of C, a professional musician who became amnesic following herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985. Although transient amnesia in a professional musician has previously been described, this is the first reported case of chronic amnesia in a highly talented professional musician. C is unusual in three respects. ⋯ Second, his amnesia includes semantic as well as episodic memory deficits. Third, he believes he has just woken up and his preoccupation with this state of 'just wakening' has persisted for over 9 years. This appears to be the result of a delusion rather than the consequence of his amnesia.
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J Clin Exp Neuropsychol · Oct 1994
ReviewDetermining random responding for the category, speech-sounds perception, and Seashore Rhythm tests.
A formula is presented for determining if scores from the Category, Speech-Sounds Perception, and Seashore Rhythm tests are significantly different from random responding. Confidence intervals for random responding are also presented. Results of published studies involving normative and non-normal subjects are reviewed, and the percentage of subjects responding in the random range are presented. Normative subjects' scores on the Category and Speech-Sounds Perception tests do not fall into the random range, but high percentages of their Seashore Rhythm Test scores do fall into the random range.
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J Clin Exp Neuropsychol · Aug 1985
Utility of the Seashore Tonal Memory Test in neuropsychological assessment.
This study assessed the diagnostic utility of the Seashore Tonal Memory Test in detecting and localizing cerebral lesions. A group of 238 subjects with focal or diffuse cerebral lesions and a group of 112 normal comparison subjects were administered the Seashore Tonal Memory Test and the Halstead-Reitan Battery. All brain-damaged subgroups did significantly worse than the normal group on the Tonal Memory Test. ⋯ In contrast, Seashore Rhythm Test scores were not significantly different for groups with right- versus left-hemisphere lesions. Tonal Memory performance was not found to be related to more precise location of structural lesions within the right hemisphere. Step-wise discriminate function analyses indicated that the Tonal Memory Test adds to the Halstead-Reitan Battery in discriminating left-hemisphere from right-hemisphere lesions and that, for this purpose, it was a better discriminator than all but one of the individual tests currently in the battery.