2004 Articles

A Comparison of Family History of Psychiatric Disorders Among Patients With Early- and Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease

Devi, Gayatri; Williamson, Jennifer; Massoud, Fadi; Anderson, Karen; Stern, Yaakov; Devanand, D P; Mayeux, Richard

The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences is of interest for what it says about one of the major directions in American psychiatry as well as for what it offers to the medical field. An increasing number of psychiatrists see their primary interest as lying in the biomedical mainstream of medicine, with a focus on diseases of the brain, or the central nervous system component of systemic diseases. This journal, the official publication of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, is an effort to address this evolving field of psychiatry. Its focus is on those psychiatric disorders in which there is an organic substrate, especially in the brain. These include strokes, delirium, alcohol-induced mental disorders, schizophrenia, and similar conditions.

The journal tends to concentrate on those aspects of disease that are medically observable rather than strictly inferential. Thus, for schizophrenia, one finds articles about electroencephalographic patterns and attentional states and higher cortical