Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Conceptual Disorganization And Redistribution Of Resting State Cortical Hubs In Drug-Naive First Episode Psychosis: A 7t Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study, Avyarthana Dey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Network level dysconnectivity has been studied in positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Conceptual disorganization (CD) is a symptom which predicts impaired real-world functioning. Systematic reviews have reported aberrant connectivity in formal thought disorder, a construct related to CD. However, no studies have investigated whole-brain functional correlates of CD in psychosis. We sought to investigate brain regions explaining the severity of CD in patients with first-episode psychosis (FEPs) compared with healthy controls (HCs). We computed whole-brain binarized degree centrality maps of 31 FEPs, 25 HCs and characterized the patterns of network connectivity in the two groups. In FEPs, we related …

White Matter Inflammation And Executive Dysfunction: Implications For Alzheimer Disease And Vascular Cognitive Impairment, Alexander Levit

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

White matter integrity is crucial to healthy executive function, the cognitive domain that enables functional independence. However, in the ageing brain, white matter is highly vulnerable. White matter inflammation increases with age and Alzheimer disease (AD), which disrupts the normal function of white matter. This may contribute to executive dysfunction, but the relationship between white matter inflammation and executive function has not been directly evaluated in ageing nor AD. White matter is also particularly vulnerable to cerebrovascular disease, corresponding with the common presentation of executive dysfunction in vascular cognitive impairment (VCI). Thus, white matter may be an important substrate by …

Searching For Wisdom: A Phenomenological Investigation Of Women's Perspectives Following Participation In An Ovarian Cancer Supportive Care Group, Helen Butlin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study used a novel methodology of hermeneutic-poetic-phenomenology to explore perspectives of women living with ovarian cancer. Each had participated in a supportive care group process Soul-Medicine prior to volunteering. Three women, Beth, Carrie, and Denise contributed to this study. The methodology was grounded in Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of poetic-phenomenology. Data was analyzed with attention to image-centred knowledge; material imagination; reverie; and horizons of hope to elucidate their implicated aspects of wisdom and the ways participant’s formed their personal wisdom integrating feminist theories of embodiment and bioethics.

Findings are framed through three images of a uniquely formed inner ‘wisdom-compass’, an …

Inviting Hallucinatory Percepts During Speech-Listening To Detect Cognitive Changes In Early Psychosis, Ana-Bianca Popa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Treatment outcomes for people with schizophrenia are more favourable if treatment starts early in the course of the disorder. Current detection methods lack specificity and do not make use of cognitive markers. We presented individuals experiencing a first episode of psychosis (FEP) and matched control participants with acoustically degraded meaningful and matched nonsense sentences to examine the degree to which people reported words that were not actually presented. Intrusion errors were counted when reported words were unrelated to words in the original sentence. Intelligibility (measured as words reported correctly) did not differ between groups but intrusion errors were more frequent …

A Review Of The Pharmacological And Clinical Profile Of Newer Atypical Antipsychotics As Treatments For Bipolar Disorder: Considerations For Use In Older Patients., Akshya Vasudev, Sumit Chaudhari, Rickinder Sethi, Rachel Fu, Rachel M Sandieson, Brent P Forester

Psychiatry Publications

Bipolar disorder prevalence rates vary in the older adult population (defined as age ≥ 65 years), ranging from 1% in community dwellers to as high as 8-10% in hospital inpatients. Although older agents, including lithium and valproic acid, offer significant antimanic efficacy, as supported by a recent randomized controlled trial (RCT), there is growing interest in using atypical antipsychotics to treat bipolar disorder in older adults. Newer atypical antipsychotics are of interest based on their tolerability and efficacy in the general adult bipolar population. The aim of this review was to systematically examine efficacy and tolerability of newer atypical antipsychotics …

Risk Perceptions Of Smoking In China, Imran Syed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Approximately one million smokers die in China every year. Risk perceptions of smoking have been theorized as being important in explaining behaviour change and have been found to be associated with initiating and quitting smoking. This study examined the extent to which smokers in China perceive risks associated with smoking (i.e., perceived likelihood of getting a smoking-related disease) and the roles of socio-demographic factors (i.e., gender, age, ethnicity, income and education) and knowledge of the consequences of smoking in explaining risk perceptions of smoking. Participants included 4861 smokers from six cities in China. The prevalence of perceived risk for smoking …

Depression And The Relationship Between Sleep Disturbances, Nightmares, And Suicidal Ideation In Treatment-Seeking Canadian Armed Forces Members And Veterans, Don Richardson, Lisa King, Kate St. Cyr, Philippe Shnaider, Maya L. Roth, Felicia Ketcheson, Ken Balderson, Jon D. Elhai

MacDonald Franklin OSI Research Centre

Background: Research on the relationship between insomnia and nightmares, and suicidal ideation (SI) has produced variable findings, especially with regard to military samples. This study investigates whether depression mediated the relationship between: 1) sleep disturbances and SI, and 2) trauma-related nightmares and SI, in a sample of treatment-seeking Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel and veterans (N = 663). Method: Regression analyses were used to investigate associations between sleep disturbances or trauma-related nightmares and SI while controlling for depressive symptom severity, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity, anxiety symptom severity, and alcohol use severity. Bootstrapped resampling analyses were used to …

Multisensory Integration And Autistic Traits Using Non-Sociolinguistic Information, Sébastien A. Lauzon, Samantha E. Schulz, Zack I. Cohen, Ryan A. Stevenson

Western Research Forum

Background: Sensory processing issues are one of the most common complaints in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One area of sensory difficulties in ASD that has been the focus of intense research in recent years is multisensory integration (MSI), or the ability to bind auditory and visual information into a single, unified percept. While integration of social or linguistic information is consistently shown to be an area of difficulty in ASD, results are less clear with simple, non-sociolinguistic stimuli. This study aims to address this ambiguity by determining whether MSI of non-sociolinguistic sensory information is related to traits and symptomatology …