Confabulating amnesic patients, amnesic non-confabulating patients and healthy controls were asked to reproduce a series of short stories. We manipulated the emotional

valence of the material by including positive, negative and neutral story plots. We also manipulated the self-reference of the material by including self-referent versus other-referent encoding instructions.

Confabulating selleck compound patients were as impaired as a group of amnesic patients in the amount of information they recalled, both groups being worse than healthy controls. Importantly, confabulating patients showed a selective bias in the negative self-referent condition, in that they recalled such information in a manner which portrayed a more positive image of themselves. This positive bias was not present in stories that were not encoded in a self-referent manner and it was not significantly correlated to patients’ self-reported mood. We propose that both confabulation and its motivated content result from a deficit in the control and regulation of memory retrieval, which allows motivational factors to acquire a greater role than usual in determining

which memories are selected for retrieval. To this extent, the self-enhancing content of confabulation could be explained as a neurogenic exaggeration of normal self-serving memory distortion. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Background/Aim: High incidence of cardiovascular learn more disease ( CVD) in chronic kidney disease ( CKD) patients is a result of an interlaced relation between oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction ( ED) and inflammation. This study tries to investigate the development of these processes in CKD patients receiving conservative treatment or on hemodialysis ( HD). We also examined the modulating

effect of oral L-arginine in HD patients having CVD. Methods: The study included 12 healthy volunteers and 63 renal patients divided into 15 renal impairment, 18 HD free of CVD, and 30 HD suffering from CVD ( HD+CVD). Of the latter, mTOR inhibitor 15 patients were given oral L arginine ( 15 g/day, 5 g t.i.d.) for 1 month. Blood levels of asymmetric dimethylarginine ( ADMA), malondialdehyde ( MDA), and homocysteine and myeloperoxidase activity ( MPO) were estimated. Results: ADMA, MDA and homocysteine were significantly elevated in renal impairment group. HD and HD+CVD patients experienced higher levels, along with high MPO activity. Significant reduction by 21, 46, 11, and 26%, respectively, in the aforementioned parameters was observed in HD+CVD patients following L-arginine intake. Conclusion: We recommend considering ADMA, MDA, homocysteine and MPO as potentially important cardiovascular risk factors in CKD patients, and focus the attention to the cardiovascular advantages of L-arginine in these patients. Copyright (C) 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel.”
“Rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known to be involved in source memory, the ability to recollect contextual information about an event.