Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may complicate Alzheimer's disease: a comorbidity problem.

Background And Aim: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may be associated with worsening of cognitive performance. We studied patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) with and without COPD, and we analyzed, in a retrospective way, clinical and neuropsychological variables to verify if COPD plays a pejorative role on cognitive or functional autonomy in patients with dementia.

Methods: We enrolled 23 adult patients (AD-COPD) with probable AD and COPD and 23 with AD only (AD-only); they were matched for sex, age, educational level, and Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) at the disease onset.

Frontotemporal Dementia Presenting as Gambling Disorder: When a Psychiatric Condition Is the Clue to a Neurodegenerative Disease.

Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, the most common form of frontotemporal dementia, is characterized by executive dysfunction and changes in personality and behavior, sometimes with associated psychiatric disorders. We report a man who suddenly developed a gambling disorder when he was 55 years old. A year later he developed personality changes of agitation, euphoria, and disinhibition, along with binge eating and dysthymia.

Abnormal postural reflexes in a patient with pontine ischaemia.

The control of body posture is a complex activity that needs a very close relationship between different structures, such as the vestibular system, and the muscle and joint receptors of the neck. Damage of even one of these structures can lead to abnormal postural reflexes. We describe a case of a woman with a left pontine ischaemia who developed a 'dystonic' extensor posture of the left limbs while turned on the right side.

Early onset frontotemporal dementia with psychiatric presentation due to the C9ORF72 hexanucleotide repeat expansion: a case report.

Background: Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) may present with psychiatric symptoms, usually together with neurological ones and in cases with a family history of dementia. We describe the case of an FTD behavioural variant with a psychiatric presentation and a normal neurological examination, due to a C9Orf72 gene mutation.

Case Presentation: The patient was a 57 years-old Caucasian woman with a recent onset of bizarre behaviours and mystic delusions.

Evidence of pre-synaptic dopaminergic deficit in a patient with a novel progranulin mutation presenting with atypical parkinsonism.

Parkinsonism can be the presenting feature of frontotemporal dementia due to Progranulin (GRN) mutations or develop over the course of the disease, mimicking idiopathic Parkinson's disease or atypical parkinsonism. Here we report on a patient carrying a novel GRN mutation who presented with asymmetric parkinsonism and developed cognitive decline and language alterations two years later. Brain MRI showed mild asymmetric fronto-parietal atrophy.

Adult osteomalacia: a treatable cause of "fear of falling" gait.

A 65-year-old man was hospitalized with a gait disorder, obliging him to shuffle laterally(1) (video on the Neurology Web site at www.neurology.org) because of pain and proximal limb weakness.

Epilepsy in Mowat-Wilson syndrome: delineation of the electroclinical phenotype.

Mowat-Wilson syndrome (MWS) is a genetic disease caused by heterozygous mutations or deletions of the ZEB2 gene and is characterized by distinctive facial features, epilepsy, moderate to severe intellectual disability, corpus callosum abnormalities and other congenital malformations. Epilepsy is considered a main manifestation of the syndrome, with a prevalence of about 70-75%. In order to delineate the electroclinical phenotype of epilepsy in MWS, we investigated epilepsy onset and evolution, including seizure types, EEG features, and response to anti-epileptic therapies in 22 patients with genetically confirmed MWS.

A case of cranial multinevritis: from the onset to the diagnosis of primary neurolymphomatosis.

Neurolymphomatosis (NL) is a rare peripheral or cranial neuropathy caused by non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Diagnosis is often delayed and prognosis is poor. The authors described a woman in her 70s with a facial left peripheral palsy, complete right abducent palsy, left hypoacusia and balance deficit.

Corpus callosum abnormalities in Tourette syndrome: an MRI-DTI study of monozygotic twins.

Background: Tourette syndrome (TS) is a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by the presence of multiple motor and phonic tics. Recent brain imaging investigations with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) techniques found reduced measures of connectivity in the corpus callosum of children with TS compared with healthy controls, thus raising the hypothesis that the reduced interhemispherical connectivity in TS reflects neural plasticity processes.

Methods: We assessed corpus callosum white-matter connectivity with fractional anisotropy (FA) index from magnetic resonance-DTI in two monozygotic twins (male sex; age 20) discordant for the diagnosis of TS.

Posterior alien hand in a left-handed person.

Posterior alien hand syndrome usually involves the non-dominant hand with lesions usually in the right hemisphere. This is the first case in a left-handed person, involving the dominant hand.

Cluster-like headache and idiopathic intracranial hypertension: a case report.

Cluster headache (CH) is a well-defined primary headache syndrome, but cases of symptomatic headache with clinical features of CH have been previously reported. Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension (IIH) is a secondary headache disorder characterized by headache and visual symptoms, without clinical, radiological or laboratory evidence of intracranial pathology. Both papilloedema and IIH-related headache are typically bilateral, however asymmetrical or even unilateral localizations are described in literature.