Dear colleagues,
It is my great pleasure to present to you our fourth issue of 2013 covering research dealing with Kraepelin's categorization of psychiatric diseases as well as latest results on biological treatment options of impulse control disorders and their brain structural and functional underpinnings.
Launching the first thematic focus of this issue, Steinberg and Himmerich aimed to reconstruct Emil Kraepelin's habilitation process back in the early 1880s, in which first attempts to categorize organic psychiatric disorders following acute inflammatory diseases were made.
Returning to the present, Zilles and colleagues set out to further clarify the diagnostic specificity of working memory deficits in the context of the Kraepelinian dichotomization of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. By assessing a range of working memory components, the authors found that patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder significantly differed only in their capability of articulatory rehearsal of verbal information.
Casas and colleagues introduce the second thematic focus of this issue with a placebo-controlled study on treatment effects of OROS methylphenidate in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and report significant symptom relief.
The aforementioned study is complemented by Rösler and colleagues, who report correlations of improvements in ADHD symptoms with better daily functioning and health-related quality of life under treatment with OROS methylphenidate in adult ADHD.
In a novel approach, Surman and colleagues investigated effects of glutamate modulation on adult ADHD by memantine monotherapy. Results suggest that memantine is largely well-tolerated and associated with symptom relief and improvement in neuropsychological performance.
Hammerness and colleagues set out to investigate the cardiopulmonary impact of lisdexamfetamine (LDX) in adult ADHD and conclude from their results that this agent is not associated with clinically meaningful changes in cardiac structure and function or in metabolic and ventilatory variables.
Placing the focus on another impulse control disorder, Kamphausen and colleagues explored the fronto-limbic neural circuitry in borderline personality disorder (BPD) by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The authors interpret their results to imply that a prolonged amygdala response and a functional disconnection between ventral and dorsal frontal regions may underlie dysregulated emotion in BPD.
Finally, Huyser and colleagues switch the focus to the impact of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in paediatric obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The authors used voxel based morphometry (VBM) to assess regional brain volume in a pre- post treatment controlled design. Results suggest a plasticity of the ventral fronto-striatal circuit in response to modulatory effects of CBT in OCD.
Yours sincerely,
Siegfried Kasper, MD
Chief Editor