Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry
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J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatr. · Feb 2014
ReviewDiagnosis and management of Marchiafava-Bignami disease: a review of CT/MRI confirmed cases.
Marchiafava-Bignami disease (MBD) is a rare condition mainly associated with alcoholism, although it may be mimicked by several other disorders that cause corpus callosum lesions. Our objective was to identify helpful features for differential diagnosis and assess whether any treatment can be recommended. ⋯ As thiamine deficiency is frequently associated with alcoholism, malnutrition and prolonged vomiting; we recommend prompt treatment of MBD with parenteral thiamine in such subjects. Recovery should be followed by repeated neuropsychological and MRI examinations, preferably using diffusion tensor imaging.
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J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatr. · Feb 2014
Clinical TrialDeep brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorders: long-term analysis of quality of life.
To evaluate the long-term effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on quality of life (QOL) in therapy-refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients. ⋯ http://isrctn.org identifier: ISRCTN23255677.
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To detect anatomical differences in areas related to motor processing between patients with motor conversion disorder (CD) and controls. ⋯ Cortical thickness increases in premotor cortical areas of patients with hemiparetic CD provide evidence for altered brain structure in a condition with presumed normal brain anatomy. These may either represent premorbid vulnerability or a plasticity phenomenon related to the disease with the trends towards correlations with clinical variables supporting the latter.
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J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatr. · Feb 2014
Depressive symptoms in Parkinson's disease are related to reduced [123I]FP-CIT binding in the caudate nucleus.
Depression is a common neuropsychiatric symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD). In previous research, PD-related depression was associated with striatal dopaminergic deficits, presumably due to degeneration of brainstem dopaminergic projections. Segregated areas of the striatum are crucially involved in various parallelly arranged cortical-striatal-thalamocortical circuits and serve functions in, among others, motor control or emotion. This suggests regional specificity of dopaminergic deficits in the striatum in motor and depressive symptoms in PD. ⋯ These results suggest that depressive symptoms in PD are associated with dopamine loss in the caudate nucleus, possibly related to degeneration of dopaminergic projections from the ventral tegmental area, while motor symptoms are associated with low dopamine signalling to the putamen and loss of nigrostriatal projections. This is consistent with the neuroanatomy of partially segregated cortical-striatal-thalamocortical circuits and supports the role of dysfunctional associative and motivational circuits in PD-related depression.
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J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatr. · Feb 2014
Unity of opposites? Chronic fatigue syndrome and the challenge of divergent perspectives in guideline development.
Guideline development by its nature is a process and method of integration and synthesis of information, be it originating from research, evidence-based medicine, clinical findings, patient experience and/or individual narratives of an illness or disease. In the majority of cases, it can be assumed that this information and these ideas are travelling in the same direction; however, it is possible that the objective and subjective cannot be synthesised, and appear mutually contradictory. ⋯ We propose that, if followed, this document would lead to the adoption of dangerous diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS, as well as preventing patients from making informed decisions about treatment options, and discouraging clinicians from following evidence-based medicine and recommending proven treatments for ME/CFS, because of potential implications for future commissioning. This commentary seeks to highlight some of the problems, contradictions and unintended consequences of a divergence between patient perspectives and evidence-based medicine despite probably sharing the same aim, that of improving patient care and striving for better understanding and better treatments for disease.