Background: Catatonia remains an area of lesser research especially in the adolescent age group. It has subtle differences in the presentation and background diagnoses as compared to adult catatonia. There is paucity of literatures regarding the role of different sociodemographic and clinical factors attributing to different treatment response.
Aims and Objectives: The aim of the study was to assess the association of socio-demographic features, background psychiatric diagnoses, and different catatonic symptoms with treatment outcome of adolescent catatonia.
Materials and Methods: The study considered 10–19 years old patients admitted in the in-patient department as per diagnostic and statistical manual diagnosis. They were assessed by Pediatric Catatonia Rating Scale (PCRS) and treated with lorazepam initially with varying dosage and duration. Modified electroconvulsive therapy was administered in resistance. Factors of these two groups were statistically analyzed to assess predictability towards outcome.
Results: There were 47 participants with mean age of 16.66±1.21 years of whom 29.8% showed positive family history of different psychiatric illnesses. Most of them came with schizophrenia and related disorders (53.2%), though mood disorders, conversion and organic brain diseases were also there. Among them 30 (63.8%) patients responded to lorazepam treatment. Positive family history, urban background, and catatonic severity in terms of higher PCRS score showed predictability to lorazepam non-response. Clinical features such as stupor, staring, negativism, withdrawal, mutism, urinary incontinence and refusal to eat or drink were associated with non-response, whereas waxy flexibility, stereotypy, verbigeration, and mannerism were seen in the response group.
Conclusion: There is need to identify warning signs such as family history, greater symptom load and certain clinical features that can lead to resistance to the treatment with benzodiazepines based on this study. It can necessitate further large-scale study to alleviate disease burden to this young and productive population.
The outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic in India has started from the month of March when many cases were tested positive for novel coronavirus. The high infectivity of the disease led many governments to impose strict lockdown with the aim of limiting its spread. To restrict its spread and save the people of India our government has also imposed strict nationwide lockdown in a phase wise manner. Though the lockdown was imposed to restrict the spread of COVID 19 but it had severe undesirable impact on the socio-economical and psychological status of the people especially of low to medium income groups involved in private jobs. The aim of this study was to study the cases of autopsied unnatural deaths with special emphasis to find out the correlation between demographic pattern of deceased with the lockdown. In this study we have analysed the 961 cases of autopsied unnatural deathsin the mortuary of Department of Forensic Medicine, NBMCH, Darjeeling, West Bengal from the first day of lockdown up to the month of September (24 th March 2020 to September 2020). All data were analysed by appropriate statistical tolls like SPSS software. In this study we found that male (66.4%) predominated over the females and most of the cases belongs to adult age group (44.27%). Persons involved in private jobs (44%) were more severely affected compared to the government jobs and cases of suicidal deaths (45.7%) rises but cases of deaths due to road traffic accidents (13.9%) drastically reduced during lockdown period.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.