As this was a study of maintenance effectiveness, subjects had to be clinically stable based on assessment by one of the research psychiatrists (PG, RM, AD), as well as a Clinical Global Impression Severity (CGI-S) score of 3 or less for a minimum of 4 consecutive weeks.
After a stabilization period of daily maintenance administration, subjects received quintuple (5× daily maintenance dose) and sextuple (6× daily maintenance dose) doses every 120 h.
e) Maintenance: The subjects routinely adopt the acquired behaviors.
Further studies are needed to support the role of leptin administration for weight maintenance in subjects who develop relative leptin deficiency in response to calorie deficit.
For entering the randomized phase of the 12-week weight maintenance phase, subjects should reduce BW with at least 5% at the end of a six-week VLCD period.
In the 'non-articulatory phonological maintenance task', subjects were instructed to vocalize the four sample letters one time but then to continuously count from one to four during the delay period.
In the 'visuospatial pattern maintenance task', subjects had to remember the spatial pattern built by the four sample positions while performing a visuospatial suppression task by following the moving star with their eyes.
In the 'non-articulatory phonological maintenance task', subjects were again instructed to subvocalise the four sample letters one time but then to silently count "one, two, three, four, one, two…" and so on during the delay period.
Finally, in the 'visuospatial pattern maintenance task', subjects were instructed to remember the spatial pattern built by the four sample positions and to perform a visuospatial suppression task during the delay period by following a little moving star with their eyes.
These results are consistent with earlier studies that found greater VLPFC activity during working memory maintenance in subjects who performed more slowly and less accurately (Rypma et al. 2002) and in low memory span relative to high memory span participants during a simple reading task (Osaka et al. 2004).
