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“Background. Memory deficits are common in depressed patients and may persist after recovery. The aim of the present study was to determine whether memory impairments were present
in young women at increased familial risk of depression and whether memory performance was related either to cortisol secretion or to allelic variation in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT).
Method. Young women (n = 35, age range 16-21 years) with no personal history of depression but With a depressed parent (FH+) carried Out the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). They also provided samples for the measurement of waking salivary cortisol and for 5-HTT genotyping. An age-matched control group Of Women (n = 31) with no family history of depression were similarly studied.
Results. The FH+ participants had
decreased immediate recall and recognition see more memory compared to controls. The impairment in recall, but not recognition, correlated negatively with increased cortisol secretion in FH+ subjects. There was no significant effect of 5-HTT allelic Status on either memory or waking cortisol secretion.
Conclusions. Impairments in declarative memory are present in young women at increased genetic risk of depression and may be partly related to increased cortisol secretion. Further Studies are needed to explore file neural mechanisms underlying the memory impairments and whether they predict the development AZD9291 of clinical illness.”
“Error processing studies in psychology and psychiatry are relatively common. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are often used as measures of error processing, two such response-locked
ERPs being the error-related negativity (ERN) and the error-related positivity (Pe). The ERN and Pe occur following committed Carnitine dehydrogenase error in reaction time tasks as low frequency (4-8 Hz) electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations registered at the midline fronto-central sites. We created an alternative method for analyzing error processing using time-frequency analysis in the form of a wavelet transform. A study was conducted in which subjects with PTSD and healthy control completed a forced-choice task. Single trial EEG data from errors in the task were processed using a continuous wavelet transform. Coefficients from the transform that corresponded to the theta range were averaged to isolate a theta waveform in the time-frequency domain. Measures called the time-frequency ERN and Pe were obtained from these waveforms for five different channels and then averaged to obtain a single time-frequency ERN and Pe for each error trial. A comparison of the amplitude and latency for the time-frequency ERN and Pe between the PTSD and control group was performed. A significant group effect was found on the amplitude of both measures. These results indicate that the developed single trial time-frequency error analysis method is suitable for examining error processing in PTSD and possibly other psychiatric disorders. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd.