Awareness of memory loss after severe closed-head injury.

This study investigated unawareness of memory loss in 48 severe closed-head injury patients. Awareness was measured as the correlation of patients' memory test scores with their self-ratings on the Everyday Memory Questionnaire (EMQ). Patients who endorsed atypical memory failures on the EMQ were classified as invalid responders. Invalid responders had poorer memory test performances and a higher rate of focal left hemispheric lesions, but did not report greater emotional symptoms. Correlations between memory test scores and memory self-ratings were weaker among invalid responders or those classified as depressed, and stronger among valid responders, especially those classified as non-depressed. The results indicate that the validity of memory self-reports is influenced by both neurogenic and psychogenic factors, and suggest that invalid responding is an important problem with self-reports by brain-injured patients.

Left ventricular ejection fraction measured with Doppler color flow mapping techniques.

To determine if left ventricular (LV) ejection fraction (EF) can be accurately measured from the color Doppler examination, 11 patients (aged 0.4 to 22 years) underwent 2-dimensional and color Doppler examinations within 24 hours of cardiac catheterization. With use of a biplane Simpson's rule, LV end-diastolic volume, end-systolic volume and EF were measured from cineangiograms, 2-dimensional echocardiograms and color Doppler examinations. The 2-dimensional echocardiographic and color Doppler measurements were obtained from apical 4-chamber and long-axis views. The color Doppler examinations were performed by placing the color sector over the left ventricle only. The velocity scale was set at the lowest possible Nyquist limit (less than 0.17 m/s), and the highest possible carrier frequency was used to obtain this limit. With these settings, all flow signals in the LV chamber were aliased so that the entire chamber was filled with mosaic color Doppler signals. Motion of the surrounding LV walls gave rise to nonaliased (pure red-blue) signals. With use of an off-line analysis system equipped with a color frame grabber, the border of the mosaic color flow area was traced to obtain volumes and EF. End-diastolic and end-systolic volumes measured with color Doppler correlated well with those measured from 2-dimensional echocardiography (r = 0.99, standard error of the estimate [SEE] = 11.9 ml; r = 0.99, SEE = 4.4 ml, respectively) and cineangiography (r = 0.92, SEE = 16.8 ml; r = 0.90, SEE = 9.9 ml, respectively).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)