Encephale
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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder frequently found in psychiatric clinic and in the population of victims of traumatic events. PTSD, characterized by an intense fear, helplessness or horror, resulting from exposure to a traumatic event, is clinically manifested with three main syndromes: reexperiencing, avoidance behavior and numbing of emotion, and physiological hyperarousal. The Post-Traumatic Checklist Scale (PCLS) is a brief and self-report questionnaire for evaluating the severity of three main syndromes of PTSD. ⋯ The PCLS showed a satisfactory test-retest reliability. The PCLS is therefore a valid and effective measurement of PTSD. It may be a useful tool for screening and assessing PTSD in clinical practice and research in psychiatry.
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Despite the fact that most researchers acknowledge the high prevalence of comorbid substance abuse among schizophrenic patients, there is no common agreement regarding the etiology of this serious public health problem. At the center of this debate though, Khantzian's self-medication hypothesis has captured most of the attention. In the present literature review, the authors evaluate this hypothesis in the light of our current knowledge. ⋯ That very paradox further casts some doubt on the self-medication hypothesis. And it opens an alternative: schizophrenic patients might be biologically vulnerable to the rewarding effects of drugs abuse. On the therapeutic level finally, the authors argue that polypharmacy medications such as clozapine and quetiapine, known to act on the reward system preferentially to the extrapyramidal system and known to dissociate fastly from the dopamine-D2 receptor, could simplify clinical intervention.
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Comparative Study
[Validation of the Short Cognitive Battery (B2C). Value in screening for Alzheimer's disease and depressive disorders in psychiatric practice].
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major healthcare challenge due to the increasing longevity of the population. Clinically prominent neuropsychological and neurological impairments, together with behavioral disorders characterize Alzheimer's disease (AD). In the past, behavioural and emotional disturbances received less attention than cognitive symptoms in studies of dementia. The association between cognitive and behavioural symptoms is complicated by the fact that such association could also occur with different patterns during depressive episode without dementia. Because Alzheimer's disease (AD) tends to be under diagnosed, there is an increasing need for accurate neuropsychological screening tools that are easy to administer by psychiatrists. The aim of the present study was to validate, in French, a sensitive and specific screening battery (B2C) designed to improve the discrimination between patients with AD, patients with depression, and healthy elderly subjects. ⋯ The main objective of this study was to demonstrate that the Short Cognitive Evaluation Battery developed in the French language is able to discriminate between patients suffering from AD and healthy elderly subjects. The results clearly demonstrate that AD patients were significantly impaired in all four tests of the B2C compared with the control group. The present study also supports the use of the screening battery for discriminating between AD and depressive subjects. The SCEB was less discriminatory for AD versus depressive patients than for AD versus controls. This could be due to the limited size of the depressive group. The verbal fluency test was the most sensitive for discriminating between AD and depression but this was at the expense of specificity. Other brief screening tests have already been developed in English speaking countries, In French language, the B2C appears to be a highly sensitive and specific tool for discriminating between patients with mild AD and healthy elderly individuals. Furthermore, in combination with clinical evaluation, the B2C could improve the specificity of the difficult discrimination between mild AD and depression. The next step of the validation process will include concurrent validity study and inclusion of a higher number of subjects with depressive symptoms.
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Many studies are searching clinical and social-demographic predictive factors of the management options in psychiatric emergency. The greater part of these researches are published in US and are seeking about patients and about conditions of psychiatric practice different of the European circumstances. Such differences have motivated us to perform a comparison between the characteristics of the native Swiss and of the foreign patients in the psychiatric emergencies. The other aim of the study was to detect, if differences are proven, some predictive factors of their management strategies. This study describes the social-demographic and clinical characteristics of a sample of 1 028 unduplicated consultations and investigates possible relationships between these clinical characteristics and different management strategies, with a particular focus on the foreign patients, covering 46.5% of all consultations. Because quite half of the psychiatric emergency visits occur with foreigners, it plays a potentially important role in searching the disparities in diagnosis and management. To verify these differences, we studied two specific questions: 1) are there nationalities differences in diagnosis with respect to the Swiss native population, and 2) are there nationality differences in management of patients visiting a psychiatric emergency service? ⋯ These observations suggest that further researches are needed to clarify the decision-making process in diagnosis and patient management in psychiatric emergency department, especially for foreigners, and to distinguish different cultural groups rather than different nationalities. The reassessment of all patients with their clinical evolution and the allocated health resources could lead to the question on the relevance of health management decisions in psychiatric emergency circumstances, as well as to the question on the influence of the foreigner status on therapeutic decisions.
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The process of disinstitutionalization combined with the economic reality is responsible for the great upheaval in taking care of psychiatric patients. The repercussions are worldwide, national, and local concerning the Philippe Pinel Psychiatric Hospital (Amiens, Somme) place of this work. So the psychiatrists of this institution have to do with the following datas: a reduction of the admissions between 1991 et 1998 (around 1,5%) and a provided reduction of the hospitalization capacities upper to 40% for the following two years. ⋯ Two facts command attention now: we must clearly define the type of patients who have really benefited of this brief hospitalization, with the object of being able to plan this strategy. By another way, it seems that a brief hospitalization, just like any hospitalization, is one part of our patients curing process for the two groups. Therefore, the choice of a psychiatric hospitalization becomes a debatable point, through the treatment of a psychiatric emergency.