William R. Leber

Temporal course of change of depression

Two hundred fifty moderately to severely depressed outpatients were randomly assigned to 16 weeks of cognitive-behavioral therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy, imipramine plus clinical management (IMI-CM), or pill placebo plus clinical management. Two hundred thirty-nine patients actually began treatment. The most rapid change in depressive symptoms occurred in the IMI-CM condition, which achieved significantly better results than the other treatments at 8 and 12 weeks on 1 or more variables. Change over the course of treatment on variables hypothesized to be most specifically affected by the respective treatments was found only in the case of pharmacotherapy, in which imipramine produced significantly greater changes on the endogenous measure at 8 and 12 weeks.

Premature Aging and Alcoholism

The proposition is frequently put forth in the literature dealing with alcohol abuse that the process which underlies the cognitive impairment found in chronic alcoholics is premature aging of the central nervous system (Fitzhugh et al., 1965; Kish and Cheney, 1969; Goldstein and Shelly, 1971; Smith et al., 1971; Jones and Parsons, 1972; Kleinknecht and Goldstein, 1972; Blusewicz et al., 1977a, 1977b; Bertera and Parsons, 1978; Ryan and Butters, 1979). This proposition has a certain amount of face validity in that the outward appearance and certain behavioral attributes of chronic alcoholics may resemble those of a person of advanced age. In addition, many of the neuroanatomical changes found in alcoholics are also similar (Courville, 1955). Beyond brief references to characteristics common to alcoholics and the elderly, little discussion of the premature aging hypothesis has appeared in the literature. In this paper, we hope to delve more deeply into the areas of similarity between alcoholic deterioratio...

Assessment of Neuropsychological Functions in Chronic Alcoholics Using a Standardized Version of Luria's Neuropsychological Technique

The Standardized Version of Lurias Neuropsychological Technique was administered to separate groups of alcoholics 3 and 11 weeks abstinent from alcohol and to an equated control group. The alcoholics were impaired compared to controls on most of the battery scales; 3-week abstinent alcoholics performed poorer than 11-week abstinent alcoholics on most scales, however, only on the Rhythm scale was the difference significant. These results and other analyses suggest that chronic alcoholics suffer from a mild diffuse-generalized brain dysfunction which persists for up to at least 11 weeks of abstinence.

Associative response bias and severity of thought disorder in schizophrenia and mania

Studied severity of thought disorder related to putative, exaggerated tendency of schizophrenics to respond to associative intrusions. Three groups of patients, paranoid schizophrenics, nonparanoid schizophrenics, and manics, participated in the investigation. The findings were: vulnerability to associative distractors is not specific to schizophrenia; performance deficit is more related to severity of thought disorder than to a specific diagnosis; degree of cognitive impairment was found to negatively influence verbal performance; the three groups of patients manifested equivalent levels of cognitive impairment.

Convergent and discriminant validity of the WIST

Tested the ability of the Whitaker Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST): (1) to distinguish schizophrenics from nonschizophrenics (N = 30); (2) to agree with clinically rated severity of thought disorder; and (3) to correlate with a measure of generalized cognitive deficit. The WIST was not found to discriminate accurately schizophrenics from nonschizophrenics, but was found to agree strongly with the Shipley Institute of Living Scale, a measure of generalized cognitive dysfunction. Finally, clinically rated estimates of schizophrenic thinking (i.e., conceptual disorganization, unusual thought content) failed to predict WIST Index. The WIST appears to be primarily a measure of generalized deficit.