[Correlation of the organic psychosyndrome in the aged with technical findings--value of EEG and CCT in psychiatric diseases in the aged].

The Psychogeriatric Department of the Bezirkskrankenhaus Regensburg is an open ward of acute cases with intensive care facilities; it exists since 2 years. There are 39 beds, admission rate is about 20-25 patients per month; patients both male and female suffer from neuropsychiatric disorders and concomitant internal diseases. There is a technical examination of all patients by EEG, CCT, cranial x-ray, and in most cases also by Doppler-sonography. The statistical evaluation aims at an attribution of neurological and psychiatric disorders resp. to technical findings. The study comprises 207 in-patients with organic brain syndromes or functional psychiatric-endogenous or psychogenic disorders. There is a better concordance in the differential diagnosis between organic brain syndrome and functional psychiatric disorders resp. and EEG than CCT, it is a statistically significant difference. Most of the psychogeriatric patients demonstrate a marked atrophy of the brain in CCT, and relation to clinical diagnosis is rare, while--apart from some exceptional cases--there is a good concordance between EEG and the clinical diagnosis "organically disturbed" or "organically normal". Though CCT being the appropriate technical method of diagnosis in cerebrovascular stroke, EEG sometimes demonstrates the localisation of an infarction at an earlier stage. EEG and CCT are indispensible in the psychogeriatric diagnostics, EEG has shown to be superior to CCT in the differential diagnosis "organic brain syndrome" vs. "functional psychiatric disorder".