Northoff: CATATONIA: BBS Call for Commentators

[Behavioral & Brain Sciences]

        Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article

        WHAT CATATONIA CAN TELL US ABOUT "TOP-DOWN MODULATION":
                   A NEUROPSYCHIATRIC HYPOTHESIS
		
                                by

                          George Northoff


http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Northoff


This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL within two (2) weeks to:

                     calls at bbsonline.org

The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation
(indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment
on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish
to comment, or to nominate someone to comment.

If you are not a BBS Associate, please  approach a current BBS
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with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and
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http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html

If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
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your name, address and email address will be entered into our database
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To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
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your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online 
BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below.

_____________________________________________________________

WHAT CATATONIA CAN TELL US ABOUT "TOP-DOWN MODULATION": 
A NEUROPSYCHIATRIC HYPOTHESIS

George Northoff, MD PhD, PhD
Harvard University
Beth Israel Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts

KEYWORDS: Catatonia; Parkinson's disease; Top-down modulation; Bottom-up
modulation; Horizontal modulation; Vertical modulation

ABSTRACT: Differentialdiagnosis of motor symptoms, as for example
akinesia, may be difficult in clinical neuropsychiatry. They may be either
of neurologic origin, as for example Parkinson's disease, or psychiatric
origin, as for example catatonia, leading to a so-called "conflict of
paradigms". Despite their different origin symptoms may appear clinically
more or less similar. Possibility of dissociation between origin and
clinical appearance may reflect functional brain organisation in general
and cortical-cortical/subcortical relations in particular. It is therefore
hypothesized that similarities and differences between Parkinson's disease
and catatonia may be accounted for by distinct kinds of modulation between
cortico-cortical and cortico-subcortical relations. Comparison between
Parkinson's disease and catatonia reveals distinction between two kinds of
modulation "vertical and horizontal modulation". "Vertical modulation"
concerns cortical-subcortical relations and allows apparently for
bidirectional modulation. This is reflected in possibility of both
"top-down and bottom-up modulation" and appearance of motor symptoms in
both Parkinson's disease and catatonia. "Horizontal modulation" concerns
cortical-cortical relations and allows apparently only for unidirectional
modulation. This is reflected in one-way connections from prefrontal
cortex to motor cortex and absence of major affective and behavioural
symptoms in Parkinson's disease. It is concluded that comparison between
Parkinson's disease and catatonia may reveal the nature of modulation of
cortico-cortical and cortico-subcortical relations in further detail.

 
http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Northoff

___________________________________________________________ 

Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having
inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear
on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was
possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees.


_______________________________________________________________________


                *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***

(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
    to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
    limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
    it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
    year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).



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Ralph
BBS

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Ralph DeMarco
Associate Editorial Coordinator
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Journals Department
Cambridge University Press
40 West 20th Street
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UNITED STATES

bbs at bbsonline.org
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