[Psychiatric features before and after intervention: a study of patients affected by severe obesity undergoing adjustable gastric banding]. / Tratti psichiatrici pre- e post-intervento: studio di un campione di pazienti affetti da grave obesità sottoposti a bendaggio gastrico regolabile.

AIM: This study identifies psychological features and the evolution of psychiatric symptoms in a group of patients affected by obesity, who underwent adjustable gastric banding. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this group, other than clinical visit, test SCL-90 is made in preoperative time. In postoperative SCL-90, TAS and BES were carried out. Patients evaluated before and after bariatric surgery were 220 and 115, respectively. SCL-90 test made before bariatric surgery showed high values (>0.7) for cluster related to somatization, interpersonal sensitivity, paranoid ideation, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. DISCUSSION: Depression symptoms were more important in patients undergoing endogastric balloon placement (mean value of 0.9). Anxious symptoms showed a mean value of 0.73 in patients undergoing endogastric balloon placement as compared to a mean value of 0.52 in patients undergoing gastric banding. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings show that in patients undergoing bariatric surgery, depressive symptoms are more common preoperatively and normalize at follow-up. This confirms that a possible cause of depression is obesity. The present study also shows that anxious symptoms are lower in obese patients.

Psychosocial aspects and psychiatric disorders in young adult with thalassemia major.

Beta-thalassemia major (TM), a chronic, genetically determined hematological disorder, has received little investigation on the psychological aspects of the disease and the psychosocial adjustment of patients with this anemia. Unfortunately, the few psychological studies referred on the literature are generally limited to the investigation of the only children with thalassemia major. The study was planned to assess the self-image, the quality of life, the way of coping and to investigate the existence of psychiatric disorders in young adults with thalassemia major. 147 patients were included in the study. Patients were psychologically investigated by three interviews: the first connects some psychosocial information, the second submits patients to the psychological test and the third gives back the results obtained by the test. The psychological test consists of the ways of coping questionnaire (WCQ), the Machover's test, The short form 36-health survey questionnaire (SF-36) and symptom-check-list-90 revised (SCL-90-R) were performed on all patients. Vis-à-vis identity and self-image were found to be low with feeling of insufficiency and being exposed to vulnerability in 80% of patients with TM. Evaluation of mean values of symptomatological dimensions in these patients showed a personality characterized by somatization (SOM), depression (DEP) and obsessive-compulsive traits. The principal coping strategy used is escape-avoidance. No statistically significant differences occurred to relation to gender, age, level education and SCL-90-R and WCQ scores. Estimation of the SF-36 scores showed that the emotional role and social function values were considerably lower than in all of the domain. As a result, the study showed that most of the patients with TM had severe psychosocial problems. Relying on these data, it was concluded that medical therapy of these patients should be supported with psychological aid and psychiatric treatment.

Is the right hemisphere involved in idiom comprehension? A neuropsychological study.

Nonambiguous idiom comprehension was assessed in 15 right brain-damaged (RBD) and 12 left brain-damaged (LBD) aphasic patients by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Idiom comprehension was found to be severely impaired with a bias toward literal interpretation. The RBD patients, though impaired, performed significantly better than LBD patients; their performance was correlated with visuospatial abilities and was significantly affected by lesion site. The results of this study suggest that the performance of RBD patients in the comprehension of idiomatic sentences may be affected by (a) an involvement of the frontal lobe and/or (b) visuospatial deficits that may impair their performance on the picture-matching task.