This thesis deals with the social and ethical aspects of the approach to clients suffering from schizophrenia. The theoretical part presents schizophrenia as a mental disorder that seriously affects our perception of reality and in which changes in personality occur. As a result, problems arise in everyday life, such as establishing close relationships, employment, housing, education or meaningful leisure time activities. These social problems threaten human with social exclusion. The practical part looks into client satisfaction with treatment in medical facilities, the clients´ main problems and offers solutions to such problems by the mediation of follow-up services. The ethical part deals with ethical dilemmas connected with the approach to clients where the common denominator is a thin line between promoting human autonomy and its limitations caused by the treatment of disease.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of our study was to assess clinical presentation of early-onset schizophrenia spectrum disoders (EO-SSD), the time to first improvement and efficacy associated with selected atypical (AAPs) and typical (TAPs) antipsychotics, as well as two main side effects - weight gain and treatment-emergent extrapyramidal symptoms (EPSs) during the treatment in patients with EO-SSD. METHODS: This was a systematic chart review of all patients receiving routine clinical care in our department, with selected AAPs (risperidone, olanzapine, ziprasidone, quetiapine and clozapine) and TAPs (haloperidol, perphenazine and sulpiride), for schizophrenic psychoses, between 1997 and 2007. During this period, our review identified 173 patients (85 males, 88 females; mean age 15.8±1.6 years); their treatment included 297 treatment trials. Data on premorbid adjustment, prodromal symptoms and psychopathology at admission, as well as comorbidity were evaluated based on the patients' medical records. The time to first improvement could be estimated in 258 treatment trials; of these, 195 (76%) comprised AAPs and 63 (24%) TAPs. The time to first improvement was assessed in agreement with the methodology established for retrospective studies as the number of treatment days prior to the first record of improvement...

The thesis deals with the contemporary topic of cognitive deficit present by schizophrenic people. It introduces the subjective point of view of the patients in more detail, which means the experience of deficits in the cognitive area. The text itself consists, as usual, of the theoretical and the research section. The theoretical section deals with the specifics of cognitive functions and their deficits present by schizophrenic patients. It focuses more closely on the subjective point of view of an individual, the impairment-related experience which follows from the impaired cognitive functions. The thesis pursues also the impact of cognitive impairment on an individual's life. A part of the theoretical section is also dedicated to the tools designated to measure cognitive functions. The major subpart is dedicated to self-evaluating tool entitled Frankfurt Complaint Questionnaire (FCQ), concerning primarily its origin, description and psychometric properties. The research section is based on the usage of the Czech translation of the FCQ in practice. Based on an observation of a sample of 53 individuals diagnosed with F20.0 and 53 healthy people, the psychometric qualities of the FCQ (discriminant validity, Cronbach's alpha, test-retest reliability) were examined. In case of patients diagnosed with...

Social Work With Clients With Schizophrenia is a disertation concerninig the problematics of schizophrenia as a serious mental disorder. It presents the most important matters of this disorder, such as how its manifestated, what are its types and how it progreses. It handles the information about how the social work with this focus group is being executed in Czech Republic, what is a psychiatric rehabilitation and how it should be processed, how should social workers approach clients with this disorder and what are the specifcs of social work with those clients. It presents examples of organisations and associations working with this focus group in Czech Republic. The experimental part is a reasearch concerning how clients with schizophrenia percieves life, how the disorder started and continued and mainly how informed those clients are about the possibilities of social services.

This diploma thesis is introducing Trail Making Test - Part A as a tool for assessment of cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. Cognitive deficit is one of the core symptoms of schizophrenia which plays a key role in the final psychosocial functioning in the life of people with schizophrenia. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the efficiency of interventions focused on improving cognitive functions and the quality of diagnostics. In this paper we were verifying a validity of TMT-A in use of cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. We have found out that the test discriminates between clinical and healthy population (n=332) quite well. Participants with schizophrenia scored significantly worse than the healthy volunteers in the time variable. We have not found any difference in the number of errors in TMT-A between the groups. In the ROC analysis we were verifying if the TMT-A has enough good sensitivity and specificity and we found positive results. The AUC value was large for the age category of 18-44 as well as for particular age subgroups. Using the regression analysis we controlled for the demographic differences of the clinical and healthy groups and we estimated the difference between the performance of clinical and healthy population of about 11,9 seconds. Due to the general nature of...

Alterations in self-experience is a relatively omitted topic in czech literature. For that reason, the following diploma thesis deals with this issue, in relation to unipolar depression and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The thesis is divided into two parts - theoretical and practical part of the research. Each chapter of the theoretical part summarizes the crucial information about schizophrenia and other disorders from schizophrenia spectrum that later appears in the research sample - as well as depression. The chapter describes symptomatology, diagnostics, epidemiology, etiopathogenesis and the treatment of the abovementioned disorders. Hereafter, the subject of alterations in self-experience is introduced and the two main phenomenologically oriented approaches to this phenomena. After that, the concrete manifestations of alterations in self-experience in schizophrenic disorders and depression are outlined. The concluding chapter of the theoretical part provides a brief account of the most famous methods in the research that focuses on alterations in self-experience. The research part of the thesis includes two sections. The first one aims to compare the changes in the experience of self in schizophrenic disorders and depression. For this purpose, the newly developed Self-disturbances Scale....

Possible connection between latent toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia is a very interesting and medically important topic. In this thesis I tried to map current state of knowledge in the interdisciplinary research of schizophrenia and Toxoplasma gondii and their possible connections as well as to show differences in responses between Toxoplasma-positive and Toxoplasma-negative subjects using simple computer-administered tests of prepulse inhibition of startle reaction (PPI). Such differences would suggest another similarity between schizophrenia patients and subjects with latent toxoplasmosis as the sensorimotor gating responsible for PPI was found to be disrupted in schizophrenia patients. Side goal of the study was to test newly developed PC software for testing PPI and to determine its applicability in further research. Subjects for the tests were recruited among adepts of professional military service; 409 subjects completed the test of acoustic PPI and 276 subjects completed the test of visual PPI. All the subjects were tested on presence of specific anti-Toxoplasma IgG in their blood serum. Both tests revealed significant (p<0.001) differences between responses on prepulse-preceded stimuli and plain stimuli without prepulse, no significant results were, however, gained for the effects of latent...

5 Abstract Cognitive flexibility is an ability to adapt a behavior according to a dynamic changes in an environment. It belongs to executive functions, along with the processes of working memory, attention, motivation and others. Flexibility is important in the process of changing "stimulus-response" contingency at the time when the initial stimulus no longer leads to reward. According to the nature of the changes we can distinguish three types of cognitive flexibility: reversal learning, intradimensional set shifting and extradimensional set shifting. The processes of cognitive flexibility take place in fronto-striato-thalamic circuit with numerous connections to other brain regions, especially the limbic system. Deficit in cognitive flexibility belongs among cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, a psychiatric illness we studied in the experimental part of this work using its analogue in rat. The aim of the experimental work was to test cognitive flexibility deficit in the rat model of schizophrenia-like behavior in the Carousel maze in four versions of task with different cognitive load. Animal model of schizophrenia was induced by acute administration of non-competitive NMDA receptor antagonist MK-801 at doses of 0.05 and 0.10 mg/kg i.p. Reversal learning was not damaged in this type of task following the...

Effects of Toxoplasmosis on Reaction Times and Prepulse Inhibition of Startle Reaction in Humans vi Abstract Toxoplasma gondii, a single-cell coccidia from almost exclusively parasitic phylum Apicomplexa, does not typically cause acute health issues in humans with most exceptions among immunodeficient individuals and pregnant mothers or, more precisely, their offspring. In the latent phase, the bradyzoites in tissue cysts placed most often in neural and muscle tissues can evolve pressure on the host's body both as a collateral effect of the presence of the parasitic organism in host's tissues and as a consequence of adaptive evolution leading to increase in probability of trophic transmission to the final host, a felid. In humans, this can result in slight changes in personality profiles, deterioration of psychomotor and cognitive functions, and development of serious mental disorders. The thesis focuses predominantly on one of the aspects of the changes, namely the effect of latent toxoplasmosis on the processing of startle signals themselves and when modified by a preceding low-intensity signal; this processing may be connected with the development of schizophrenia in predisposed individuals. Studies conducted within the project framework found changes int the speed of signal processing in...

The Nogo-A protein belongs among the most important regulatory molecules in the brain, regulating development of neuronal and glial cells, axon guidance and adult synaptic plasticity. Although it has been studied mainly as an obstacle to axon regeneration after CNS injury, it plays a role in many pathological conditions, including neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases. This work offers a literature review of the current knowledge about functions of Nogo-A and related proteins, and then recapitulates the results of experiments focused on the impact on decreased expression of Nogo-A on behavior in a transgenic rat model. The most important finding is that the Carousel Maze performance, tapping higher cognitive functions such as cognitive coordination and cognitive flexibility, is remarkably impaired in this model, while other cognitive functions, such as spatial navigation and both spatial and non-spatial memory are spared in the Nogo-A deficient rats. The results are discussed in the context of a hypothesis linking Nogo-A mutations or abnormal expression to human schizophrenia. We conclude that the Nogo-A deficient rats constitute a very promising animal model of schizophrenia and deserve further attention. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)