[Neurophysiologic aspects of psychoorganic deficiency problems of depressive disorders of the involutional age].

Abstract

From a multidimensional viewpoint 40 depressive patients of involutional age (mean age 55 years) were evaluated in terms of an operationally defined deficiency syndrome, i.e. vital reduction per organic brain coloration to establish a neurobiologic matrix of correlation between the level of clinical psychopathology and neurophysiology. A subtle diagnosis by means of evoked potentials (SEP and VEP) measuring the neuronal infrastructure allows for a global evaluation of sensory-specific "cortical-subcortical functional integrity", otherwise missed in terms of the conventional EEG. In both vitally reduced patients and in probands who were diagnosed as having an organic brain syndrome because of clinical psychopathologic phenomenology, impaired bioelectric signal processing, increased neuropsychological deficits, risk factors and enlargement of the third ventricle were measured together with a chronic course of the nosologically classified disease. Compared with depressive patients who may have any deficiency factor, and healthy elderly probands (mean age 86 years), a deficiency syndrome is suggested as being defined as a polysystemic aging process which is dynamically induced by endogenous and exogenous factors, thus, being time dependent. Although there are correlative results between the disciplines, an abnormal (neuronal) functional diagram should only be used in a pathoplastic sense as an indicative and associative reaction of the CNS to premature aging processes at various levels.