Recently added articles from Functional Neurology:
The effects of botulinum toxin in spasticity and headaches: a common key?
Apr 01, 2008; ... Botulinum toxin is considered the best approach in the pharmacological treatment of spasticity. Its use is particularly indicated in patients in whom overactivity of selected muscles at the level of the upper and/or lower limb is detectable. In lower limb spasticity after stroke, different ...
Acute treatment of migraine in children and adolescents
Apr 01, 2008; ... Summary The management of headaches with juvenile onset presents several problems, related not only to appropriate drug selection but also to the specific features distinguishing headache disorders in children and adolescents: a child is not a "little adult". Many age-related factors ...
Cerebral blood flow changes in patients with probable medication-overuse headache
Apr 01, 2008; ... Summary Transcranial Doppler (TCD) is a non-invasive method for measuring blood flow velocity (BFV), and a marker of vessel diameter. In this study, intracranial BFV was investigated, by means of TCD, in patients suffering from probable medication-overuse headache ...
Tension-type headache. Comparison with migraine without aura and cervicogenic headache. The Vågå study of headache epidemiology
Apr 01, 2008; ... Summary The aim of the present study was to describe the prevalence of tension-type headache (T-TH) in rural Norway, and 1838 citizens aged 18-65 years were included. Features indicating neck involvement were also looked for. T-TH was compared with migraine without aura and with ...
Cerebrospinal fluid neuron-specific enolase: a further marker of Alzheimer's disease?
Apr 01, 2008; ... Summary To investigate whether neuron-specific enolase (NSE) plays a role in dementia, we measured cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) concentrations of NSE, Abeta42 and total protein tau (h-tau) in different dementia patients. We studied 159 patients: 76 with Alzheimer's disease (AD), 35 with ...
Plasma melatonin pattern in chronic and episodic headaches. Evaluation during sleep and waking
Apr 01, 2008; ... Summary To look for a relationship between pineal function in chronic migraine (CM), cluster headache (CH) (during active and remission periods), chronic tension-type headache (CTTH) patients and controls during NREM sleep, REM sleep and waking, we performed serial sampling of plasma ...
Oxcarbazepine and adverse events: impact of age, dosage, metabolite serum concentrations and concomitant antiepileptic therapy
Apr 01, 2008; ... Summary The aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between oxcarbazepine (OXC) dosage, metabolite mono-hydroxy-derivative (MHD) serum concentrations, number of concomitant antiepileptic drugs, age and incidence of adverse events (AEs) in epileptic patients. A ...
Combined effects of botulinum toxin and casting treatments on lower limb spasticity after stroke
Apr 01, 2008; ... Summary Optimal treatment of spasticity requires a combination of pharmacotherapy and muscle lengthening. We evaluated 13 stroke patients with equinovarus foot randomized to treatment with either botulinum toxin A (BTA) injection plus ankle-foot casting (n=6) or BTA alone (n=7). The ...
The difficult task of combining the bricks of neurophysiology with the rubble of clinical neurology
Jan 01, 2008; ... I have been asked to comment, from a neurophysiologist's viewpoint, on the wealth of data and theories that Professor Pinelli and his coworkers have presented in this issue of Functional Neurology. The task is quite daunting and I must confess to the distinct feeling that I am far from up to it ....
Neural sequences: an introduction and overview
Jan 01, 2008; ... The neurosciences today cover such a wide range of sectors and with such depth and accuracy of investigation that they have earned the admiration not only of specialists from different branches of science, but also of philosophers and humanists. Particular interest has been generated by analyses ...
Are "cycles" a sufficient basis for psychodynamics?
Jan 01, 2008; ... Chronobiological rhythms In a lucid paper published just over a decade ago, K. Gaarder set out his ideas on how "matter, energy and information are organized in particular ways within space and time to manifest life." According to him, it is up to biology, together with its ...
Neuromotor sequences for recognition of brain/mind activities: a new device and tests
Jan 01, 2008; ... The hand In the XVI and XVII centuries, the revising of old concepts, by Newton, Copernicus and Galileo, led to the birth of a new science, characterized by multiple logics and a lack of dogmatism. Now, at the start of the 2000s, we see the brain as reflecting our own selves and ...
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Jan 01, 2008; ... 12-19 April 2008: Chicago, IL, USA 60th ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF NEUROLOGY Website: www.aan.com/go/am 17-19 April 2008: Montecatini, Italy VIII CONGRESS OF THE ITALIAN SOCIETY OF NEUROLOGICAL REHABILITATION (SIRN) Website: ...
The fuzzy frame in the deterministic stream
Jan 01, 2008; ... Summary Brain and cognitive processes are probably the most complex behaviors that can be found in nature. Neurobiologists, neurologists and cognitive scientists have used many different approaches to explore brain behaviors and complementary efforts in these different areas have yielded ...
Neural sequences: deductive principles and rules
Jan 01, 2008; ... Summary A neural sequence is set not only by deterministic, but also by chaotic rules. The former are, mainly, recency effects, while the latter intervene in the early stage of the performance. Chaotic-like sequences can be recognized by the presence, within them, of greater ...
Neural sequences: experimental evidence and deductive principles
Jan 01, 2008; ... Summary Comprehensive study of brain performances implies reference to sequences of repetitive functional elements (events). In this particular experimental field, these are sequences of psychomotor reactions and particularly verbal reactions with different modalities of stimuli and ...
Applicative neural sequence criteria. From theoretical principles to practical applications: terminology and comments
Jan 01, 2008; ... Accuracy: According to a principle known as Fitts law, there exists negative competition between reaction velocity and response accuracy. This phenomenon was pointed out as early as 1899 by Woodworth (1), but it was the psychologist Paul Fitts (2), in 1954, who demonstrated that time of movement ...
Neurophilosophy: an introduction and overview
Oct 01, 2007; ... More than twenty years ago, the term "neurophilosophy" was coined to characterise an emerging field of cross-disciplinary research. The term reflects the potentially revolutionary developments whereby high level theories about the mind interact with neuroscientific results from many levels of ...
Neuroimaging technology and philosophy: a coming of age?
Oct 01, 2007; ... Over the past twenty years technological advances in medical imaging have prompted extensive research into the neural activity of the human brain. In particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique which visualises changes in regional cerebral blood oxygenation during the ...
Neurophilosophy: the early years and new directions
Oct 01, 2007; ... Summary Neurophilosophy embraces the hypothesis that what we call "the mind" is in fact a level of brain activity. A corollary of this hypothesis states that we can learn much about the reality of mental function by studying the brain at all levels of organization. Until fairly recently, ...