Encephale
-
Headache patients frequently overuse analgesic medications: 20% of the patients from headache centers is concerned by this problem, which has been estimated to occur in four percent of the community migrainers. Frequent use of various types of headache medication may paradoxically cause an increase in headache attack frequency as well as their chronicisation due to potentially complex mechanisms of sensitization. Patients will enter into a self- perpetuating cycle of daily headaches and use of symptomatic medications which can lead to addiction and to social and occupational impairement. ⋯ Those patients, when becoming aware of dependance, succeed in withdrawal at home, without the need of an hospitalization. The analgesic medication overuse and dependance can also be considered as a maladjusted strategy to manage pain (with prevalent passive and avoidant coping strategies). More research is required focusing on psychopathological aspects of analgesic overuse and dependance, to improve withdrawal modalities and to reduce the rate of relapses.
-
To evaluate the psychometric characteristics of the CES-D (Center for Epidemiological Studies - Depression Scale) in adolescents and to estimate the prevalence of major depression in French high-school students. ⋯ The high internal consistency and the factor structure of the CES-D suggest its reliability in adolescents. This study found a high frequency of probable major depression in French high-school students.
-
According to a thesis based on the idea of an influence of cognitions in the structuring of internal reality, emotional awareness, ie the capacity of representing your own emotional experience and that of others, is a cognitive process that goes into maturation. Defining this concept, Lane and Schwartz present a cognitivo-developmental model in five stages of the processes of symbolization, accounting for the differences in levels of emotional awareness observed in individuals. The organization of these cognitive processes would thus be structured in well differentiated stages, in which the development of the emotions would be inseparable from the development of ego and of the relation to others. ⋯ Furthermore, the study of the reliability made it possible to highlight excellent intra-class correlation coefficients (r=0.993). The French version of the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale thus appears to be valid and accurate and should allow the study of levels of emotional awareness on psychopathology. It is about an easily acceptable and simple questionnaire of use in varied clinical circumstances.
-
Schizophrenic patients are known to feature alterations in their cognitive performances, principally in executive functions, attention and memory. In this last domain, studies have shown a relatively severe and global deficit, which can be assessed in chronic and first episode patients. It seems that the memory dysfunction is independent of age and intellectual level, but does correlate with negative psychopathology and global functioning. ⋯ Further analyses taking into account group differences on attention suggest that the impairment featured by schizophrenic patients in the domain of verbal memory strongly relies on an attentional deficit. These results are discussed according to the existing literature and methodological limitations. Clinical implications are also discussed.