Differentiation of organics from schizophrenics at two chronicity levels by use of the Reitan-Halstead Organic Test Battery.

Abstract

An attempt was made to determine whether the Reltan-Halstead Organic Test Battery separates neuropsychiatric hospital organics from schizophrenics. The battery was administered to 25 schizophrenics and 2$ cerebral-lesion organics at each of 2 chronicity levels. Only 1 of the 24 diagnosis/Diagnosis X Chronicity effects used to evaluate the data was significant at the .05 level, indicating that actuarial application of Reitan-Halstead scores is of no practical value in the separation of the 2 groups. To determine whether expert clinicians might improve upon the actuarial results, protocols of 24 schizophrenics and 24 organics were sent to 8 Reitan-Halstead experts who were instructed to separate them into brain-damaged and schizophrenic diagnostic groups. The mean number of correct classifications, 25.5 out of 48, suggested that clinical judgment added nothing to actuarial prediction in this case.

EEG Sleep Diagnosis of Medical Disease in Depression

“…Studies of patients with profound brain dysfunction, characterized by focal or diffuse encephalopathies (Wernicke-Korsakoff disease), senile dementias or mental retardation have shown that assessments of intellectual functioning, using measures of IQ, correlate significantly with the amounts of rapid eye movement activity (5-7, 20, 33). Although our group of medical depressive patients was not as intellectually impaired as groups of brain-damaged patients previously studied, their neuro psychological performance was poor, with scores on the BVRT comparable to the results reported in patients with severe brain damage (40). Thus, phasic REM activity measures appear to be significant predictors of the presence of medical pathology among patients with a depressive syndrome and suggesting that the use of REM sleep parameters may represent a more accurate method of detecting such pathology rather than neuropsychological testing.…”

Neuropsychological effects of electroconvulsive therapy

“…The specific suggestion that schizophrenics, particularly chronic schizophrenics, cannot be differentiated from Ss who suffer from some organic syndrome also has been advanced (Lacks et al, 1970;Watson et al, 1968). This should not be a surprising finding.…”

The Pittsburgh Initial Neuropsychological Testing System (PINTS): A neuropsychological screening battery for psychiatric patients

“…However, the discriminatory accuracy of the procedure within the difficult population studied is actually no better than what was found in the past for such procedures as the Hal-stead-Reitan battery (Watson et al, 1968). The heterogeneity of the samples used and the inclusion of schizophrenics in the non-brain-damaged groups make high-level discriminatory accuracy quite difficult to achieve, and the authors do not wish to leave the impression that PINTS can do what other forms of neuropsychological assessment cannot.…”