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Empathy and emotion recognition in epilepsy
Vargová, Helena ; Kulišťák, Petr (advisor) ; Krámská, Lenka (referee)
Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder characterised by epileptic seizures. It may be accompanied by cognitive deficits and unappropriate affective changes. This theses addresses an as yet not well investigated - emotion recognition and empathy in epilepsy. Firstly, the theoretical part describes emotion recognition that uses information from facial expression, posture, gestures and utterances. Then, it discusses empathy as the capacity to comprehend other persons' feelings and incentives from their own perspective, which increases individuals' prosocial behaviour. Neurobiological correlates of both are described thereafter. As a part of social cognition, these can also be impaired in epilepsy disorder - which is depicted in two most extensive thesis subchapters. The theoretical part is followed by the empirical one. It introduces own research which have explorative character, and is focused on 28 patients with idiopathic generalised epilepsy and their 21 asymptomatic biological siblings in comparision to healthy control groups. It uses translated testing methods and verifies in a basic manner their appropriatness of usage. In consequence, it reports the outputs which do not confirm any significant differences among participant groups. However, they show mild deviation of the patients' and...
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Evaluation pre- and post surgery dynamics of cognitive development in pediatric epilepsy surgery patients, design pre- andpost surgery protocol for neuropsychological assessment
Maulisová, Alice ; Niederlová, Markéta (advisor) ; Krámská, Lenka (referee) ; Kulišťák, Petr (referee)
Epilepsy represents the most common neurological disease, its prevalence reaching up to 1%, and around 30% of patients become refractory to treatment. In these patients, epilepsy surgery is often their only chance for disease-free life. Aetiology of epilepsy is heterogenous; we recognize genetic, structural- metabolic epilepsy and epilepsy with unknown aetiology. Patients with focal pharmacoresistant epilepsy may become candidates for epilepsy surgery; the same does not apply to patients with metabolic or neurodegenerative disease. Multiple factors influence decision about epilepsy surgery, the most important ones being (i) the type of known or presumed structural lesion and (ii) the possibility to precisely delineate the epileptogenic zone (the area of seizure generation). Another factor that needs to be accounted for is the proximity of epileptogenic zone to the eloquent cortical areas (the areas with important neurological functions, e.g. motor or speech functions). Epilepsy surgery principally aims for complete removal the epileptogenic zone, and subsequently for complete freedom from seizures. Hypothesis on the localization of the epileptogenic zone arises from the combined information gained from various diagnostic, mostly neuroimaging, methods. Cognitive profile examination includes...
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Evaluation of Psychometric Characteristics of Czech Version RBANS
Brodská, Veronika ; Krámská, Lenka (referee) ; Kulišťák, Petr (referee)
The thesis deals with the Czech version of the original American neuropsychological battery RBANS (i.e. Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status). There are two objectives of the thesis: verifying the test-retest stability and assessment of the equivalency of the two alternate forms, form A and B of the Czech version of the RBANS. The theoretical part deals with neuropsychological diagnostics and its methods, it also presents a neuropsychological battery RBANS, describes a test method, testing materials and organization of the scale, and it reminds RBANS use in clinical practice through a number of foreign studies. The practical part analyse data that were obtained from the group of 46 healthy volunteers aged between 20 and 77 years by repeated administration of the method. The time period between test and retest was 1 month. The test-retest stability was evaluated by the coefficient of stability and the equivalence of forms A and B by a coefficient of equivalence. Furthermore, there were evaluated possible correlations with the level of education and age. The test-retest coefficients of stability were in total score of 0.75 and 0.71 and they ranged from 0.43 to 0.85 in indexes; and equivalence coefficients were in total score of 0.72 and 0.71 and they ranged from 0.43 to 0.87 in...
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The Ecological Validity of the Tests of Executive Functioning in Patients with Schizofrenia
Drozdová, Kristýna ; Kulišťák, Petr (advisor) ; Krámská, Lenka (referee) ; Bahbouh, Radvan (referee)
Aim: The current study investigated a pattern of associations between executive functions and everyday functioning in a sample of schizophrenia patients with the aim to specify the ecological validity. The ecological validity as a specific form of external validity refers to the extent of the relation of the test outcome measures and patients' behaviour in everyday situations. Sample and methods: A sample of 77 patients (22 women and 55 men) with the diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, who met study inclusion criteria, was assessed with several executive function tests: Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Trail Making Test B (TMT B), Phonemic Verbal Fluency Test and Semantic Verbal Fluency Test (VF), Similarities from Wechsler Adult Inteligence Scale (WAIS III), Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test in Boston Qualitative Scoring System (BQSS), and with rating scales for patients' behavior in everyday situations - Personal and Social Performance Scale (PSPs), newly developed clinical scale (CliSca), Interview for Assessment of Insight (SAI) and patients' self rating in Social Functioning Scale (SFS). Relationships between demografic measures and test outcomes were examined. Results: Verbal fluency tests did correlate significantly with the newly developed clinical scale that seems...
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Verification of psychometric characteristics of the Multiple Errands Test method in patients with brain damage
Jarošová, Kateřina ; Krámská, Lenka (advisor) ; Höschlová, Eva (referee)
The thesis deals with the issue of executive functions in patients with acquired brain injury and possibilies of executive deficit detection in real life circumstances. The thesis is divided into theoretical and empirical part.The theoretical part consists of three chapters. In the first chapterthe definition, localization and different disorders of executive functions are mentioned. The second chapter presents some neuropsychological methods suitable for executive functions assessment and their limits. In the final chapter the Multiple Errands Test method and its various modifications are introduced. The main purpose of the empirical part was to evaluate the ability of the Multiple Errands Test method - hospital version (MET - HV) to detect deficits in executive functions related to daily life functioning. The research group consisted of patients with acquired brain injury (N = 20) and neurologically healthy adults (N = 20) hospitalized in the Rehabilitation Center Kladruby. The results proved the ability of the method MET - HV to distinguish well between patients with acquired brain damage and healthy adults. The second hypothesis concerning the ability of the method to distinguish between patients with frontal and nonfrontal injury wasn't confirmed. Another purpose of the empirical part was to...
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Profiles of cognitive deficit and the use of a short neuropsychological battery in different types of dementia
Bolceková, Eva ; Kulišťák, Petr (advisor) ; Krámská, Lenka (referee) ; Jirák, Roman (referee)
Pro les of cognitive de cit and the use of a short neuropsychological battery in di erent types of dementia Eva Bolceková Abstract This work focuses on cognitive de cit pro les and the use of a short neuropsychological battery in patients with di erent types of dementia. Increasing prevalence of dementia syndromes highlights the need of their e cient diagnostics in clinical-psychological practice. Theoretical part of this work presents an overview of neurodegenerative diseases with em- phasis on their neuropsychological presentation. We describe the cogni- tive domains and their neuropsychological examination. We address in detail the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) and its experimental Czech version. Research part of the work is based on neuropsychological examinations of 311 patients with cognitive de cit and 118 healthy controls. Patients' group is comprised of subjects with Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, vascular cognitive impairment, Lewy Body disease, frontotemporal lobar degene- ration and patients with depression. We assess their cognitive pro les, present sensitivity, speci city, positive and negativne predictive values of RBANS scores for the groups and compare the results of control subjects with the original normative sample. We...
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Neuropsychological issues of psychogenic nonepileptic seizures
Sobotková, Eva ; Krámská, Lenka (advisor) ; Kulišťák, Petr (referee)
Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) are abrupt paroxysmal changes in behaviour, sensation, or experience that mimic epilepsy, but that are not accompanied by the electrophysiological changes typical for epilepsy. Their cause is psychological. An examination of neuropsychological correlates of PNES is therefore crucial for understanding, effective diagnosis and treatment of this disorder. The aim of our study is to explore a specific neuropsychological profile of patients with PNES, particularly cognitive impairment, early parental bonding and occurrence of selected life events during childhood and before the onset of PNES. We examined 38 patients with PNES and 38 healthy controls matched for age and sex using neuropsychological battery RBANS, PBI questionnaire and a checklist of life events. The results showed that overall cognitive performance of patients with PNES was significantly worse in comparison with healthy controls. However, there was no significant difference between the two groups in immediate memory and language domains. Furthermore, patients with PNES recollected significantly more paternal control in childhood, more stressful situations, more opportunities for social learning of the sick role, more health problems in childhood and also significantly more troubles preceding the...
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Executive function disorder in persons after traumatic craniocerebral injury
Sahula, Petr ; Kulišťák, Petr (advisor) ; Krámská, Lenka (referee)
This thesis is working with theoretical aspects of psychological construct called executive functions, integrative models and various cases from clinical practice. Second part is elaborating neuroanatomy of frontal lobes with main interest on functional systems of the prefrontal cortex. Third aspect of this thesis is introduction to the clinical perspectives of traumatic brain injury. The last section works with neurpsychological assessment including subchapter containing informations about most popular neuropsychological methods of executive function diagnostics.The practical part includes design of research from the field of diffuse axonal injury diagnostics. It suggests possible method of detecting this "silent" brain injury. Keywords: executive functions, prefrontal cortex, traumatic brain injury, neuropsychological assessment
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Neuropsychological correlates of conversion to dementia in patients with mild cognitive impairment
Šiffelová, Kamila ; Kulišťák, Petr (advisor) ; Krámská, Lenka (referee)
Identification of individuals with low and high risk for future dementia has emerged as an important clinical and public health issue. To address this issue, we compared two commonly used memory tests initially in non-demented elderly persons with subjective memory complaint or mild cognitive impairment and followed them for an average of two years. The first test called Enhanced Cued Recall (ECR), provides support for the semantic encoding of memorandum at the time of the study and supplies category cues at the time of retrieval whereas the second test, the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT), does not support this paradigm. In this retrospective study, we compared initial neuropsychological performance of patients from the Memory Disorders Clinic in the Department of Neurology at Motol University Hospital. The results were analyzed among the patients who developed dementia and those who did not. Then, the prediction abilitities of the two measures of memory were compared. Our results showed that the test AVLT predicts incident dementia better than the test ECR. The group likely to develop dementia becomes a target for early therapeutic interventions. Keywords: prediction of dementia, conversion to dementia, Alzheimer's disease, test AVLT, test ECR
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