Egocentric frame of reference: its role in spatial bias after right hemisphere lesions.

The reference shift hypothesis of unilateral neglect holds that spatial bias in left neglect stems from a rightward deviation of patients' egocentric frame of reference (ER). Twenty five unselected right brain-damaged patients participated in a straight-ahead pointing task to assess the position of their ER (Experiment 1). A rightward ER shift emerged only in the subgroup of patients with extensive parietal lesions.

Retrospective survival analysis and cost-effectiveness evaluation of second allogeneic bone marrow transplantation in patients with acute leukemia. Gruppo Italiano Trapianto di Midollo Osseo.

The therapeutic options for patients with acute leukemia who relapse after the initial transplant include second bone marrow transplantation (2BMT) and conventional chemotherapy (CC). In this work, we conducted an analysis of published survival data and we evaluated the cost-effectiveness of 2BMT in comparison with CC. We retrieved survival information on 167 patients treated with 2BMT and 299 patients treated with CC.

Right-side neglect in Alzheimer's disease.

Unilateral neglect--the inability to pay attention to events occurring on one side of space--usually occurs for left-side events after focal right-hemisphere damage. We report a 73-year-old woman with probable AD and no evidence of focal brain lesions who showed signs of right-side neglect and extinction. Neglect was more severe after 1 year.

Scanning direction and line bisection: a study of normal subjects and unilateral neglect patients with opposite reading habits.

Sixty normal dextrals (30 left-to-right and 30 right-to-left readers) and two left unilateral neglect patient with opposite reading habits performed a passive line bisection task. In order to study the effect of scanning direction on performance, subjects had to stop a mark moving on the to-be-bisected line either from the left to the right or in the opposite direction. Results showed that the position of the subjective middle was dependent upon the scanning direction of the line for all the subjects.

Position of the egocentric reference and directional arm movements in right-brain-damaged patients.

We asked 12 right-brain-damaged patients (6 with left neglect signs and 6 without left neglect signs) to perform a straight ahead pointing task and a visual detection task with lateralized motor response, in order to investigate the relationship between the position of the egocentric reference and response time and accuracy in producing lateralized arm movements. Results showed that there was no correlation between the position of the egocentric reference and neglect signs, nor between the position of the egocentric reference and the latencies to direct a motor response toward either side of space. These findings were interpreted within the context of egocentric hypotheses of neglect.

Unrelated donor marrow transplantation for chronic myelogenous leukaemia.

Between January 1989 and July 1995 the search for an unrelated donor (UD) was started for 379 consecutive Italian patients with Philadelphia positive (Ph+) chronic myelogenous leukaemia (CML). 89 (23%) were transplanted. The overall probability of transplant before and after December 1991 was 16% and 49%, respectively (P=0.

Unrelated donor marrow transplantation for inborn errors.

From December 1989 to December 1997 40 children aged 1 year to 19 years with inborn errors other than severe combined immunodeficiencies underwent unrelated donor (UD) bone marrow transplantation (BMT) in one of 10 institutions of the Italian Bone Marrow Transplant Group participating in this program. The diseases leading to BMT included Fanconi Anemia (10), Thalassemia (8), Wiskott Aldrich syndrome (5), haemophagocytic lymphohystiocytosis (6), osteopetrosis (3), storage diseases (6), Chediak Higashi syndrome (1), Schwachman syndrome (1). Thirty-three pairs were A, B, DRB1 matched.

Allogeneic stem cell transplantation for Fanconi Anaemia. Severe Aplastic Anaemia Working Party of the EBMT and EUFAR. European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation.

Fanconi anaemia is a hereditary disorder characterised by chromosomal breaks increased by cross-linking agents. Bone marrow transplantation is the treatment of choice when a HLA identical sibling donor has been identified. The use of low-dose cyclophosphamide with thoraco-abdominal irradiation for the conditioning regimen of FA patients has lead to a dramatic improvement of survival, with a long-term survival of 75% at our institution.

Multiple-domain dissociation between impaired visual perception and preserved mental imagery in a patient with bilateral extrastriate lesions.

A brain-damaged patient is described whose pattern of performance provides insight into both the functional mechanisms and the neural structures involved in visual mental imagery. The patient became severely agnosic, alexic, achromatopsic and prosopagnosic following bilateral brain lesions in the temporo-occipital cortex. However, her mental imagery for the same visual entities that she could not perceive was perfectly preserved.

Perception and action in hemispatial neglect.

Hemispatial neglect is a neurological disorder which entails a spatial bias that penalizes events occurring in the hemispace contralateral to a brain lesion. Mechanisms operating upon various stages ranging from perception to action have been invoked to explain neglect. The present study explores the contribution of a defective programming of arm movements towards the neglected hemispace to neglect behaviour.

Disruption of residual reading capacity in a pure alexic patient after a mirror-image right-hemispheric lesion.

A 74-year-old woman became a letter-by-letter reader after the occurrence of a left occipito-temporal hematoma. Seven months later, she suffered a second, mirror-image hematoma in the right hemisphere. After this second lesion, her residual reading capacity deteriorated dramatically in terms of both accuracy and reading latencies for words and isolated letters.

Comparative Study of FISH, PCR and Cytogenetics on 25 Patients Submitted to Bone Marrow Transplantation (BMT) for Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML); Which Tests can we Use in Routine Analysis Post BMT?

Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML) shows an excellent response to allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) with a 60-80% long term disease free survival in recipients of unmanipulate marrow. The most frequent cause of treatment failure is leukaemic relapse, due to the re-emergence of malignant recipient clones. Clinical and haematological relapse is usually preceded by molecular evidence of relapse.

Patterns of dissociation between left hemineglect and deviation of the egocentric reference.

Sixteen control subjects and six right brain-damaged patients with left hemiparesis (three showing signs of left unilateral neglect, three with no signs of neglect) performed a straight-ahead pointing task with their right hand while blindfolded. The aim was to test the hypothesis that the egocentric reference shows significant ipsilesional deviation in left neglect patients. We found no correlation between the position of the egocentric reference and the presence of neglect signs.

Confabulation following rupture of posterior communicating artery.

In this study we report a patient, MG, who following rupture of left posterior communicating artery exhibited an amnesic-confabulatory syndrome. Neuropsychological examination showed severe impairment on episodic memory tasks, which were marred by florid but plausible and semantically appropriate confabulation. Performance on tasks involving various kinds of semantic knowledge was normal or only mildly impaired.

Growth after recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) treatment in transplanted thalassemic patients.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the treatment effects with recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) in a group of patients after bone marrow transplantation for thalassemia major. At the end of treatment we divided the subjects into two groups according to the outcome of the therapy: responder and nonresponder. Responder group: after 24 months of rhGH administration, growth rate was still significantly higher in respect to start of treatment (P < 0.

Preserved imagery for colours in a patient with cerebral achromatopsia.

We report the case of a patient who, after sequential bilateral strokes in the occipital regions sparing the primary visual cortex, developed a severe deficit of colour perception. At variance with other reports of acquired achromatopsic patients, she showed a perfectly vivid visual imagery for colours. These findings, together with similar data in domains other than colour processing, challenge the theories which posit that the same cognitive processes are involved in both the perception and the retrieval from memory of a given stimulus.

The novelty effect in recovered hemineglect.

Left neglect patients, patients who had recovered from left neglect and control subjects performed a task of simple motor reaction times (RTs) to lateralised visual stimuli. Neglect and recovered patients were slower than controls on left-sided targets. To explore the time course of the allocation of attention across space, an analysis of responses as a function of the serial order of the trials was performed.

Second allogeneic bone marrow transplantation in acute leukemia: a multicenter study from the Gruppo Italiano Trapianto Di Midollo Osseo (GITMO).

Thirty-eight second allogeneic bone marrow transplants (BMT) for acute leukemia relapsed after first BMT were performed in 13 Italian centers between 1987 and 1994. Twenty-one patients had acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), 17 acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL); at second BMT 24 patients were in complete remission (CR) and 14 in relapse. The median time to relapse after first BMT was 10 months (range 1-70).

Letter dyslexia in a letter-by-letter reader.

We describe a letter-by-letter patient who produced misreading errors in both letters in isolation and in words. All errors were visual in nature. We hypothesized an access deficit to the abstract visual representation of letters that prevents letter identification.