Patients with schizophrenia are unable to link the separate aspects of events into a cohesive, memorable, and distinctive whole. The corollary of this defective relational binding is a quantitative and qualitative impairment of autonoetic awareness.
The effects of lorazepam (0.026 or 0.038 mg/kg), a benzodiazepine, and of a placebo on metamemory, i.e. knowledge about one's own memory capabilities, were investigated in 36 healthy volunteers. Accuracy of confidence levels (CL) in the correctness of recalled answers and accuracy of feeling of knowing (FOK) the answers when recall fails were measured using a sentence memory task assessing episodic memory and a task consisting of general information questions and assessing semantic memory. Lorazepam impaired episodic memory. Unexpectedly, it also impaired performance in both the recall and recognition phases of the task assessing semantic memory, suggesting that it decreased the ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect information. In episodic memory, lorazepam 0.038 mg/kg-treated subjects exhibited an impaired CL accuracy, compared to placebo-treated subjects, and their FOK accuracy was at chance. In semantic memory, their overall CL and FOK accuracy was apparently spared. However, these subjects selectively overestimated their CL judgements for incorrect answers; moreover, secondary analyses showed that FOK accuracy for a subset of low-accuracy items was virtually nil. These results suggest that lorazepam impairs metamemory for both episodic and semantic memory.
1167 workers of Lorraine (France) iron mines, a random sample of 5600 workers aged 35 to 55 years, at work in 1975 constituted the initial cohort that was examined twice at 5-year intervals after the first examination. A questionnaire on respiratory symptoms and smoking habits (MRC questionnaire) plus questions on the work history of each participant was completed, vital capacity (VC), forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1.0), residual volume (RV) and fractional uptake of CO (FuCO) were measured at the first examination and repeated five and ten years later. At the end of the ten year follow-up, 522 subjects were re-examined, 186 were lost to follow-up, 328 answered a mail questionnaire, and 111 had died. The total number of deaths was not different from that of the general population, but for lung cancer the standardized mortality ratio (SMR) was significantly increased (SMR = 3.7). For the miners re-examined, frequency of bronchitis and decrease of functional tests were more related to age and smoking habits than to occupation.
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