A scoping review of initiatives to reduce inappropriate or non-beneficial hospital admissions and bed days in people nearing the end of their life: much innovation, but limited supporting evidence.

Background: Hospitalisation during the last weeks of life when there is no medical need or desire to be there is distressing and expensive. This study sought palliative care initiatives which may avoid or shorten hospital stay at the end of life and analysed their success in terms reducing bed days.

Methods: Part 1 included a search of literature in PubMed and Google Scholar between 2013 and 2018, an examination of governmental and organisational publications plus discussions with external and co-author experts regarding other sources.

Development of human electrophysiological brain networks.

Functional activity in the human brain is intrinsically organized into independently active, connected brain regions. These networks include sensorimotor systems, as well as higher-order cognitive networks such as the default mode network (DMN), which dominates activity when the brain is at rest, and the frontoparietal (FPN) and salience (SN) networks, which are often engaged during demanding tasks. Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggests that although sensory systems are mature by the end of childhood, the integrity of the FPN and SN develops throughout adolescence.

Multi-subject hierarchical inverse covariance modelling improves estimation of functional brain networks.

A Bayesian model for sparse, hierarchical, inver-covariance estimation is presented, and applied to multi-subject functional connectivity estimation in the human brain. It enables simultaneous inference of the strength of connectivity between brain regions at both subject and population level, and is applicable to fMRI, MEG and EEG data. Two versions of the model can encourage sparse connectivity, either using continuous priors to suppress irrelevant connections, or using an explicit description of the network structure to estimate the connection probability between each pair of regions.

Impaired corticomuscular and interhemispheric cortical beta oscillation coupling in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Objectives: The neural activity of the primary motor cortex is variably synchronised with contralateral peripheral electromyographic signals, which is thought to facilitate long-range communication through the motor system. Such corticomuscular coherence (CMC) is typically observed in the beta-band (15-30 Hz) range during steady force production. We aimed to measure pathological alteration to CMC resulting from ALS.

Increased cerebral functional connectivity in ALS: A resting-state magnetoencephalography study.

Objective: We sought to assess cortical function in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) using noninvasive neural signal recording.

Methods: Resting-state magnetoencephalography was used to measure power fluctuations in neuronal oscillations from distributed cortical parcels in 24 patients with ALS and 24 healthy controls. A further 9 patients with primary lateral sclerosis and a group of 15 asymptomatic carriers of genetic mutations associated with ALS were also studied.