Effect of bromazepam versus placebo on inhibition and waiting capacity in young women with traits of anxiety

[Cognition and perception deficits in fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis]

INTRODUCTION

Cognitive disturbance in patients with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis is today a topic of a great clinical interest, largely due to the fact that these persons often complain about cognitive problems.

OBJECTIVE

This study is aimed to assess the visuospatial memory, attention and perceptive capacities in chronic pain patients.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

Groups were constituted by fibromyalgia patients and rheumatoid arthritis patients, as well as a control group. All the subjects completed a battery of visual and spa-tial memory, speed of processing, working memory, attention, orientation and visuoperceptive abilities. A cognitive reserve measurement was obtained.

RESULTS

Results show that chronic pain patients displayed worse cognitive performance than controls. Moreover, arthritis patients execute poorly when compared to the group of fibromyalgia in tasks that demand visuoperceptive integration and visuomotor processing. Patients suffering fibromyalgia obtained worse punctuations than those with arthritis in spatial memory and spatial orientation tasks.

CONCLUSIONS

Both groups developed important cognitive deficits, which cannot be explained by the collateral effects of such pathologies, because cognitive profiles are not similar and appear from the beginning of the disease.

Inhibitory attentional control in patients with frontal lobe damage

The performance of a group of frontal lobe lesion and a group of frontal lobe dementia patients was compared with the performance of their respective matched normal control groups on two tests of inhibitory attentional control-the stop-signal reaction time task and a negative priming task. Both patient groups responded significantly slower than their respective normal control groups, but they showed only marginally significant selective impairments on the measures of inhibition. The data suggest that the specific inhibitory processes evaluated by these two tests are, in general, spared in patients with focal frontal lobe lesions or frontal lobe degeneration.