Posttraumatic stress disorder with amnesia following asphyxiation.

We describe five cases of traumatic asphyxiation injury, each meeting diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and characterized by a range of postinjury cognitive impairment. Four patients exhibited dense retrograde amnesia, including absence of conscious memory for the traumatic event. Appreciation of these asphyxiation cases, which involve temporally extended trauma exposure, may help resolve arguments regarding the possibility of co-occurrence of PTSD and neurological amnesia based exclusively on observations of much briefer duration events (specifically, motor vehicle crashes). These five cases also provide evidence that cognitive symptoms of PTSD can develop in the absence of conscious memory for the event.

Education-stratified base-rate information on discrepancy scores within and between the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Third Edition and the Wechsler Memory Scale--Third Edition.

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Third Edition (WAIS-III; D. Wechsler, 1997a) and the Wechsler Memory Scale--Third Edition (WMS-III; D. Wechsler, 1997b) are 2 of the most frequently used measures in psychology and neuropsychology. To facilitate the diagnostic use of these measures in the clinical decision-making process, this article provides information on education-stratified, directional prevalence rates (i.e., base rates) of discrepancy scores between the major index scores for the WAIS-III, the WMS-III, and between the WAIS-III and WMS-III. To illustrate how such base-rate data can be clinically used, this article reviews the relative risk (i.e., odds ratio) of empirically defined "rare" cognitive deficits in 2 of the clinical samples presented in the WAIS-III--WMS-III Technical Manual (The Psychological Corporation, 1997).