Global Impact of COVID-19 on Stroke Care and IV Thrombolysis.

Objective: To measure the global impact of COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of IV thrombolysis (IVT), IVT transfers, and stroke hospitalizations over 4 months at the height of the pandemic (March 1 to June 30, 2020) compared with 2 control 4-month periods.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional, observational, retrospective study across 6 continents, 70 countries, and 457 stroke centers. Diagnoses were identified by their ICD-10 codes or classifications in stroke databases.

Management of patients with spontaneous intracranial hypotension causing altered level of consciousness: report of two cases and review of literature.

Background: Decreased level of consciousness is a rare neurological manifestation of spontaneous intracranial hypotension (SIH), which typically presents with orthostatic headache. The optimal management of this uncommon presentation remains uncertain.

Methods: We analyzed the presentation, management and outcome of two patients in our institution and reviewed 22 patients reported in the literature with SIH and decreased level of consciousness, defined as any decrease in the patient's Glasgow Coma Scale score.

Structural abnormalities in neurons are sufficient to explain the clinical disease and fatal outcome of experimental rabies in yellow fluorescent protein-expressing transgenic mice.

Under natural conditions and in some experimental models, rabies virus infection of the central nervous system causes relatively mild histopathological changes, without prominent evidence of neuronal death despite its lethality. In this study, the effects of rabies virus infection on the structure of neurons were investigated with experimentally infected transgenic mice expressing yellow fluorescent protein (YFP) in neuronal subpopulations. Six-week-old mice were inoculated in the hind-limb footpad with the CVS strain of fixed virus or were mock infected with vehicle (phosphate-buffered saline).

Therapy with minocycline aggravates experimental rabies in mice.

Minocycline is a tetracycline derivative with antiapoptotic and anti-inflammatory properties, and the drug has been shown to have beneficial effects in a variety of models of neurological disorders. The potentially neuroprotective role of minocycline was assessed in experimental in vitro and in vivo models of rabies virus infection. In this study, 5 nM minocycline did not improve the viability of embryonic mouse cortical and hippocampal neurons infected in vitro with the attenuated SAD-D29 strain of rabies virus, based on assessments using trypan blue exclusion.

Rabies virus infection of primary neuronal cultures and adult mice: failure to demonstrate evidence of excitotoxicity.

Cultures derived from the cerebral cortices and hippocampi of 17-day-old mouse fetuses infected with the CVS strain of rabies virus showed loss of trypan blue exclusion, morphological apoptotic features, and activated caspase 3 expression, indicating apoptosis. The NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate acid) antagonists ketamine (125 microM) and MK-801 (60 microM) were found to have no significant neuroprotective effect on CVS-infected neurons, while the caspase inhibitor Ac-Asp-Glu-Val aspartic acid aldehyde (25 microM) exerted a marked neuroprotective effect. Glutamate-stimulated increases in levels of intracellular calcium were reduced in CVS-infected hippocampal neurons.