Comparative Essay on Medical Articles

Comparative Essay on Medical Articles

Introduction

Among the two articles selected for comparative essay, one is “Depression and Stages of Huntington's Disease”, written by the Huntington Study Group which includes authors: Jane S. Paulson et.al. This article represents the research done in the field of Huntington's disease, by studying the individuals with this disease. To characterize the depressed mood across the disease course in HD, the study group interviewed these individuals with regard to frequency, presence and severity of depression symptoms and come up with the relation of depression with HD at its different levels. This article was published in Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in the year 2005.

The other article selected for the study is “Depression in patients with Huntington disease correlates with alterations of the brain stem raphe depicted by transcranial sonography”, written by Christos Krogias et.al. This article evaluates the TCS findings in patients with HD in correlation with their neurologic and psychiatric status and for this study the group recruited the patients who have genetically confirmed Huntington disease. The article was published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience in the year 2011.

Discussion

Both the articles selected, study the depression in Huntington disease patients, however the second article (as mentioned in introduction) correlates this depression with the alterations of the brain stem raphe which is depicted by transcranial sonography (Krogias, 2011). Whereas first article just relates depression with HD and studied it at different stages of HD (Paulsen et al, 2005). The main focus of both the studies is same i.e. depression in Huntington disease, just the framework of second one is different. One major similarity among both studies is that both used the same scale for research i.e. Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale, as it is the standardized clinical rating scale used to assess Huntington's disease.

The major difference between both is that in second article the study is completed by using Transcranial sonography (Krogias, 2011), whereas the first article used Chi-square tests, besides using UHDRS. Non-parametric, two-tailed chi-square test was used to compare the proportion of individuals endorsing symptoms of depression across stages. In this study post hoc pair wise nonparametric chi-square analyses were also employed (Paulsen et al, 2005). Another difference between the studies of both the articles is that in first article the participants studied were all diagnosed of definite HD due to the presence of motor abnormalities observed ...