These results indicate florbetaben to be a safe and efficacious β-amyloid-targeted tracer with favourable brain kinetics. Subjects with AD could be easily differentiated from HCs by both visual and quantitative assessment of the PET data. The operator-independent, voxel-based analysis yielded whole brain β-amyloid load which appeared valuable as a surrogate marker of disease severity.

Forty-three patients with schizophrenia were investigated with a short neurocognitive screening battery focussing on working memory and executive functions. As compared to healthy controls, patients showed impairments in the modified card sorting test, in verbal fluency and all span tasks with exception of digit span forward. Patients who were treated with atypicals showed better performance in the digit ordering test (manipulation task) when compared to a group of patients who received conventional antipsychotics; this difference was not due to disease severity, age or education. Manipulation tasks might be useful for neurocognitive follow-up and intervention studies.

Schizophrenia is associated with cognitive deficits in the domains of working memory, strategic memory and other executive functions. In the current study we used a computerised and item-cued variant of the directed forgetting (DF) task to assess inhibitory processes in verbal memory. Twenty-five patients with schizophrenia and a group of matched controls were tested. Recognition memory was better for to-be-remembered (TBR) than for to-be-forgotten (TBF) words in both patients and controls. As compared to healthy controls the patients with schizophrenia showed overall memory deficits and difficulties to inhibit memories as indicated by a significant group by cue interaction and a smaller DF effect. The DF effect was associated with disease duration but not with symptom severity. Memory-related inhibition problems are difficult to assess in patients with schizophrenia and might be related to fronto-temporal disconnection.

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