TB deficits may be conceived as a fundamental marker of AD. The Flash-card version is suitable for clinical use also in primary care facilities and in intervention trials, requires minimal training for administration and scoring, is quick to administer, non-invasive, inexpensive, and facilitates cross-cultural studies. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The objective of the study was to compare the efficacy and tolerability of once-daily atomoxetine (< or =1.8 mg/(kg day) with those of placebo in children and adolescents (aged 6-16 years) with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD (DSM-IV)]. This randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial was conducted in Russia. The primary efficacy measure was baseline-to-end point changes in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Rating Scale-IV-Parent Version: Investigator-Administered and Scored (ADHDRS-IV-Parent:Inv) total score. Tolerability measures included treatment-emergent signs and symptoms (TESS), laboratory values and weight. Compared with patients in the placebo group (n = 33), patients treated with atomoxetine (n = 72) with a mean final dose of 1.4 mg/kg showed significantly greater improvement in ADHDRS-IV-Parent:Inv total score (least-squares mean: atomoxetine, -15.8; placebo, -11.4; p = 0.013). The most common TESS in the atomoxetine group included anorexia [atomoxetine, n = 13 (18.1%); placebo, n = 2 (6.1%)], somnolence, n = 11 versus n = 3 (15.3% vs. 9.1%, respectively), abdominal pain n = 9 versus n = 1 (12.5% vs. 3.0%, respectively) and nausea, n = 8 versus n = 1 (11.1% vs. 3.0%, respectively). Seven patients in the atomoxetine group and two in the placebo group experienced clinically important weight loss during the study (> or =7% from baseline; mean change, kg: atomoxetine, -0.6; placebo, 0.1; p = 0.032). Atomoxetine is efficacious in improving ADHD symptoms in children and adolescents. Atomoxetine treatment may be associated with a numerically higher incidence of anorexia, somnolence, abdominal pain and nausea, as well as statistically greater losses in body weight.

Schizophrenia falls into the small category of diseases that impair the total psychic activity rather than particular brain systems and functions. It is not surprising that researchers have long been interested in the integrative activity of the human brain in schizophrenia. They have reported considerable data on histological and physiological changes in the human brain, providing evidence for disturbance of interrelationships and functional association between different parts of the brain at different stages of schizophrenia [1][2][3]. The most conspicuous data have been obtained for the brain electrical activity [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Based on these data, a hypothesis of disintegration of cortical functions (the disconnection hypothesis) has been advanced [11] to explain the schizophrenic disorders [11][12][13].In EEG studies, spectral and correlation analyses are a common method for investigating the integrative activity of the human brain, yielding evidence for the impairment of local and distant synchronies of neuronal networks in schizophrenia [4,5,7,8,14]. However, a number of limitations typical of spectral methods, specifically, of the coherence function [7,[15][16][17], have motivated the development of new techniques to examine the interdependences of EEG paired time series data in schizophrenia, including nonlinear interdependence [9], mutual information transmission measure [18], and phase locking [10], which reflect nonlinear and, in the last case, also in-phase components of the interdependence of cortical electrical processes.The results of the above studies are also in line with Friston's hypothesis of disintegration of neuronal networks in schizophrenia [11].Yet, cortical bioelectrical processes associated with ontological nonstationarity of the EEG signal [19][20][21] are not covered by the traditional or new methods of quantitative analysis of EEG spatiotemporal correlations.EEG nonstationarity implies that the EEG signal consists of quasi-stationary segments that reflect the changes in metastable states of the brain on different time scales [20,21], from microstates, with a duration of no more than several seconds [15,22], to macrostates, with a duration of tens or hundreds of minutes [23]. This concept of EEG nonstationarity provides a means for obtaining new insights into the cooperation of cortical structures. For this purpose, it is possible to estimate the EEG structural synchrony [15], i.e., the temporal synchronization of intersegmentary transitions between different EEG channels. Estimation of the spatiotemporal synchronization of local metastable states of neuronal networks appears to be a new measure of the integrative activity of the human brain.The functional importance of the EEG structural synchrony and segment characteristics has been described in a series of our works performed in several laboratories and with several cognitive and pharmacological paradigms [24][25][26][27]. In our previous work [28], changes in quasi-stationary segments of the EEG α activity were detected i...

Background Temporary memory binding (TMB) has been shown to be specifically affected by Alzheimer’s disease (AD) when it is assessed via free recall and titrating the task demands to equate baseline performance across patients. Methods Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) were subdivided into patients with and without cognitive impairment and compared with AD and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) patients on their performance on the TMB. Results The results show that only patients with AD dementia present with impaired TMB performance. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses showed that TMB holds high sensitivity and specificity for aMCI and AD relative to PD groups and healthy controls. Conclusion The TMB is sensitive to the neurodegenerative mechanisms leading to AD dementia but not to those underpinning PD dementia. As such, TMB task can aid the differential diagnosis of these common forms of dementia.

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