Am J Psychiatry 1978; 135:13-21
Copyright © 1978 by American Psychiatric Association
"Organic brain syndromes": an empirical study and critical review
B Seltzer and I Sherwin
The authors found that all but 3 of 80 randomly chosen patients in a
Veterans Administration hospital who had been given a primary nonspecific
neuropsychiatric diagnosis (organic brain syndrome, organic psychosis,
chronic brain syndrome, etc.) could be assigned to specific diagnostic
categories. Diagnosis was based on chart review and thorough neurological
and clinical evaluation. Senile and alcoholic dementia and Korsakoff's
syndrome were seen most often, and 15% of the patients were diagnosed as
having functional disorders of the mental state. The authors review the
organic brain syndrome diagnosis in light of this and other evidence. They
believe that fractionation into more specific diagnoses is essential to
further understanding of this group of diseases. Use of the general term
can result in inappropriate or no treatment; further, it hampers essential
psychological, pharmacological, and biomedical research on these disorders.
