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Latent toxoplasmosis as a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia and a modulator of its course
Holub, David ; Libiger, Jan (advisor) ; Přikryl, Radovan (referee) ; Pavlovský, Pavel (referee)
Schizophrenia is serious, multifactorial and chronic disease. The crucial tasks to introduce effective preventive, diagnostic and treatment measures is to identify etiology factors, their interaction and etiology factors-genetic predispositon interactions. TG (Toxoplasma gondii) is the most promising infectious candidate with "schizophrenogenic" potential. Toxoplasmosis is a lifelong parasitosis considered as a risk factor to schizophrenia. No consistent clinical pattern has been detected in Toxoplasma-infected schizophrenia patients as yet. We assessed symptom profile, cognitive performance and treatment response of Toxoplasma- infected and Toxoplasma-free schizophrenia patients to determine whether co-occurrence of schizophrenia and Toxoplasma infection modifies clinical presentation and the course of schizophrenia. We screened for anti-Toxoplasma antibodies in 251 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder consecutively admitted to Prague Psychiatric Centre between 2000 and 2010. Fifty-seven patients were infected (22.7%). Infected patients spent more days in hospital during their last admission compared to uninfected ones (p=0,003; mean difference 32.9 days). Schizophrenia started approximately one year earlier in infected men and about 3 years later in infected women. This corresponds to sex related...
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Changes in Brain Metabolism in the Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders Revealed by Quantitative Electroencephalography and Positron Emission Tomography
Kohútová, Barbora ; Horáček, Jiří (advisor) ; Libiger, Jan (referee) ; Syka, Josef (referee)
Low Resolution Brain Elecromagnetic Tomography (LORETA) is a method of quantitative EEG (QEEG), which permits 3D tomography of electrical brain activity. Positron emission tomography (PET) reflects changes of brain metabolism and regional blood flow. The aim of the thesis was to evaluate the neurobiological correlates of changes in psychopathology during treatment of schizophrenia and depression, revealed by QEEG and PET, subsequently to evaluate the applicability of these two methods, and third to compare the mechanism of two therapeutic tools, antipsychotics and low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (LF-rTMS) from QEEG point of view. The first part contains the theoretical information about disorders and therapeutic tools and the review of QEEG and PET findings. The empirical part is based on four articles (Tislerova et al., 2008; Horacek et al., 2007; Kopecek et al., 2011; Kopecek et al., 2008) and a common discussion constitutes the end part. In the study 1, we compared schizophrenic patients treated with olanzapine or clozapine with antipsychotic-naive patients. We found changes of electrical activity in anterior cingulate and in temporo-limbic structures. In the study 2 we studied schizophrenic patients with auditory hallucinations treated by LF-rTMS. The clinical improvement was...
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Dissociation: Phenomenology, Pathophysiology and Relation to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Raszka, Michal ; Praško Pavlov, Ján (advisor) ; Papežová, Hana (referee) ; Libiger, Jan (referee)
The aim of this study was to investigate dissociative symptoms in OCD from many angles. This is the context in terms of psychopathology, prediction of therapeutic effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), neuropsychology (with emphasis on inhibitory processes), the structure of personality, and neurobiology. The work offers a model of neurobiological correlates of blending dissociation and OCD, which has been experimentally validated parts.
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Visual mismatch negativity among patients with schizophrenia
Urban, Aleš ; Libiger, Jan (advisor) ; Brázdil, Milan (referee) ; Přikryl, Radovan (referee)
Cognitive deficit is considered to be one of the basic symptoms of schizophrenia. It is associated with the social impairment and the long term outcome of the disorder. In addition to neuropsychological methods, event-related potentials can be used to study cognitive functions. In patients with schizophrenia an association was found between the amplitude changes of slow negative component of evoked responses to infrequent deviant stimuli in a series of uniform stimuli. This change is known as mismatch negativity (MMN) and it is assumed to be independent of the focused attention and effort that may interfere with neuropsychological testing. The recent accumulation of knowledge on MMN as a possible preattentive measure of perceptual processing supports its potential significance for diagnostic and functional evaluation of schizophrenia. MMN elicited by visual stimuli (vMMN) was described by several research teams, but it has not been investigated in schizophrenia as yet. Using a motion-direction paradigm, we elicited visual MMN in 24 patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. The vMMN was computed as difference in areas under curve (AUC) of visual ERPs to standard and deviant motion direction stimuli recorded from midline derivations at the interval of 100-200 msec. AUC were compared...
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