BACKGROUND Neurological soft signs preceding adult-onset schizophrenia suggest a neurodevelopmental origin and could reflect physical illness in childhood. AIMS To investigate possible associations of adult-onset psychosis with neurological soft signs and common infectious illnesses in childhood. METHOD Using data from the UK National Child Development Study, a longitudinal general populati...

BACKGROUND This study attempted to longitudinally investigate neuropsychological function, illness representations, self-esteem, mood and quality of life (QoL) in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and compared them with both healthy participants and a clinical comparison group of individuals with autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD). METHOD Neuropsychological evaluation was adminis...

OBJECTIVE Daily stress processes have been previously linked to health-related outcomes, but implications for longevity remain unclear. The present study examined whether daily stress exposure and/or affective responses to daily stressors predicted mortality risk over a 20-year period. Based on the hypothesis that chronic illness confers vulnerability to deleterious effects of stress, we also e...

Not the least of our problems in psychiatry is the ubiquitous anxiety state. These patients are an unsatisfactory group because there seem to be no established indications for treatment, and it is rare to find anyone who is prepared to give an unequivocal prognosis. This is due in large measure to the fact that anxiety is a word having varying connotations, so that "anxiety state" is not a prec...

T h e proposal to divide manic depressive illness into separate bipolar (alternating mania and depression) and unipolar (recurrent depression or recurrent mania) psychoses was first brought-forward by Leonhard (1959), but it was Angst (1966) who first produced convincing evidence in support of the divison. Perris (1968) was able to show that bipolar illness started on average of fifteen years e...

OBJECTIVE Bipolar affective disorder is clinically heterogeneous, and clinical features that run in families may help define more homogeneous phenotypes. The authors sought to establish whether polarity at illness onset, which is related to severity and course, is a familial feature of bipolar affective disorder. METHOD The authors studied 971 subjects from 507 families ascertained through si...

With great interest, we read the study of Hoffmann et al. (1985) on the effects of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) on sleep and biogenic amines. This study is a nice confirmation and generalization of the results of a case report we recently published (Grunhaus et al., 1985). In that study we presented serial sleep recordings and dexamethasone suppression test (DST) results of a psychotically d...

The concept of affective temperaments is rather old; however, studies by Akiskal and colleagues (Akiskal, Djenderedjian, Resenthal, & Khani, 1977) revived the concept by postulating that temperamental dysregulation may constitute the link between predisposing familial-genetic factors and affective disorders such as bipolar disorder. According to their view, temperament could represent the earli...

BACKGROUND There is little published guideline or evidence on treating bipolar affective disorder in patients with renal failure having haemodialysis. CASE We present two patients with bipolar affective disorder with renal failure having haemodialysis. We used lorazepam in one patient to manage the immediate risk of non-engagement with dialysis. Risperidone was added in the second patient for...