Exploring the Association Linking Head Position and Sleep Architecture to Motor Impairment in Parkinson's Disease: An Exploratory Study.

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) tend to sleep more frequently in the supine position and less often change head and body position during sleep. Besides sleep quality and continuity, head and body positions are crucial for glymphatic system (GS) activity. This pilot study evaluated sleep architecture and head position during each sleep stage in idiopathic PD patients without cognitive impairment, correlating sleep data to patients' motor and non-motor symptoms (NMS).

Cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers for predicting phenoconversion in patients with isolated rapid-eye movement sleep behavior disorder.

Study Objectives: Patients with isolated rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) have an increased risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases. This study assessed cerebrospinal-fluid (CSF) biomarkers of neurodegeneration and blood-brain barrier (BBB) alteration in patients with iRBD compared to controls and ascertain whether these biomarkers may predict phenoconversion to alpha-synucleinopathies (Parkinson's Disease (PD), Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), Multiple System Atrophy (MSA)).

Methods: Patients and controls underwent between 2012 and 2016 a neurological assessment, a lumbar puncture for CSF biomarker analysis (β-amyloid42 - Aβ42; total-tau, and phosphorylated tau), and BBB alteration (CSF/serum albumin ratio).

Optimizing non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies against COVID-19 using artificial intelligence.

One key task in the early fight against the COVID-19 pandemic was to plan non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce the spread of the infection while limiting the burden on the society and economy. With more data on the pandemic being generated, it became possible to model both the infection trends and intervention costs, transforming the creation of an intervention plan into a computational optimization problem. This paper proposes a framework developed to help policy-makers plan the best combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions and to change them over time.

Isolation and characterization of potential multiple extracellular enzyme-producing bacteria from waste dumping area in Addis Ababa.

Extremozymes are innovative and robust biocatalysts produced by various microorganisms from harsh environments. As thermophilic organisms can only develop in a few places, studying them in geothermal environments has provided new insights into the origins and evolution of early life and access to significant bio-resources with potential biotechnology applications. The work aimed to isolate and identify likely multiple extracellular enzyme-producing thermophilic bacteria from an Addis Ababa landfill (Qoshe).