Publications by authors named "Isabel Allen"

Based on historic observations that children with reading disabilities were disproportionately both male and non-right-handed, and that early life insults of the left hemisphere were more frequent in boys and non-right-handed children, it was proposed that early focal neuronal injury disrupts typical patterns of motor hand and language dominance and in the process produces developmental dyslexia. To date, these theories remain controversial. We revisited these earliest theories in a contemporary manner, investigating demographics associated with reading disability, and in a subgroup with and without reading disability, compared structural imaging as well as patterns of activity during tasks of verb generation and non-word repetition using magnetoencephalography source imaging.

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Cross-linguistic studies with healthy individuals are vital, as they can reveal typologically common and different patterns while providing tailored benchmarks for patient studies. Nevertheless, cross-linguistic differences in narrative speech production, particularly among speakers of languages belonging to distinct language families, have been inadequately investigated. Using a picture description task, we analyze cross-linguistic variations in connected speech production across three linguistically diverse groups of cognitively normal participants-English, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), and Italian speakers.

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Objective: To calculate the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) for the Vestibular Migraine Patient Assessment Tool and Handicap Inventory (VM-PATHI).

Study Design: Prospective cohort study.

Setting: A single tertiary care balance and falls center.

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Objective: To study if galcanezumab is effective for vestibular migraine (VM).

Background: There are currently no placebo-controlled trials showing that treatment is effective for VM. Therefore, we performed the first placebo controlled, randomized clinical trial of a calcitonin gene-related peptide-targeted monoclonal antibody for VM.

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Purpose Of Review: This study aims to systematically review platelet dosage in platelet rich plasma (PRP) injections for common musculoskeletal conditions.

Recent Findings: Notable heterogeneity exists in the literature regarding platelet dosage. Clinical studies indicate that a higher dosage may lead to improved outcomes concerning pain relief, functional improvement, and chondroprotection in knee osteoarthritis (OA).

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Introduction: Our goal was to understand health care utilization by comparing hospital encounters among individuals with spina bifida and the general population and to identify the factors associated with utilization.

Methods: Using the Department of Health Care Access and Information database (1995-2017), individuals with spina bifida were identified and matched to controls by birth year. The primary outcome measures were the number of hospital encounters (stratified as ≤2 vs ≥3 encounters) and the time between the first and second encounters.

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Background: Weight and waist gain are significant concerns in adulthood. Both weight and waist gain are particularly important among South Asians, known to have an increased risk of developing chronic cardiometabolic complications at any body mass index compared to other racial and ethnic groups. The aim of this study was to investigate factors predicting weight and waist gain in a longitudinal cohort of South Asians living in the US (United States).

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Article Synopsis
  • Delirium is a serious mental condition often found in hospitalized older adults and is difficult to predict; this study examines how electronic health records (EHR) can help identify risk factors.
  • Researchers analyzed data from 7,492 UCSF patients with inpatient delirium and found significant links between delirium and various health conditions, including sex-specific factors like dementia and infections.
  • The study indicates that a diagnosis of inpatient delirium increases mortality risk and highlights the potential of EHR to enhance predictions of delirium development based on prior health issues and the importance of considering sex differences.
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Objective(s): This study investigated the frequency and intensity of vestibular migraine (VM) symptoms using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). This approach was intended to provide insights into the day-to-day experiences of individuals with VM, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of this condition.

Methods: Participants reported symptoms to an automated text system, rating their dizziness over the prior 24 h as none, mild, moderate, or severe.

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Objective: The aging population in developing countries demands parallel improvements in brain health assessment services to mitigate stigma, promote healthy aging, and diagnose cognitive impairments including dementia in primary health care (PHC) facilities. The lack of culturally appropriate cognitive assessment tools in PHC facilities delays early detection. This study aims to culturally adapt a brief digital cognitive assessment tool for PHC professionals in Southeast Nigeria.

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Introduction: School-based social support for Black students may mediate or modify the association between school segregation and late-life cognition.

Methods: Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans participants (n = 574) reported segregated school attendance and school-based social support. Associations of segregated schooling with domain-specific cognitive outcomes and effect modification or mediation by school-based social support were evaluated with linear mixed models.

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Importance: Micromobility, the use of small vehicles (primarily scooters and bicycles), has become a standard transportation method in the US. Despite broad adoption of electric micromobility vehicles, there is a paucity of data regarding the injury profiles of these vehicles, particularly in the US.

Objective: To characterize micromobility injury trends in the US, identify demographic characteristic differences in users of electric and conventional vehicles, and identify factors associated with hospitalization.

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Article Synopsis
  • Itching is common in older adults and may indicate neurodegenerative diseases like frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD-SD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), as certain brain areas associated with itch sensations could be affected by these conditions.
  • A study compared the incidence of itching in patients with FTLD-SD and AD, using brain MRIs and medical records from a research project at UCSF over a period of nearly 20 years.
  • Results showed that itching was more prevalent in FTLD-SD patients (38%) compared to those with AD (18%), suggesting a possible link between unexplained itching and neurodegenerative processes, particularly in those with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia.
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Unlabelled: The majority of people with dementia live in low or middle-income countries (LMICs) where resources that play a crucial role in brain health, such as quality education, are still not widely available. In Brazil, illiteracy remains a prevalent issue, especially in communities with lower socioeconomic status (SES). The PROAME study set out to explore basic education in illiterate adults as a means to improve cognitive reserve.

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Objective: We compared the accuracy of amyloid and [F]Flortaucipir (FTP) tau positron emission tomography (PET) visual reads for distinguishing patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia with fluid biomarker support of Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods: Participants with FTP-PET, amyloid-PET, and diagnosis of dementia-AD (n = 102), MCI-AD (n = 41), non-AD diseases (n = 76), and controls (n = 20) were included. AD status was determined independent of PET by cerebrospinal fluid or plasma biomarkers.

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We examined whether vision impairment (VI) and hearing impairment (HI) and dual sensory impairment (DSI) affect cognitive performance and whether depression mediates that effect. We examined 55,340 participants from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, which assessed 32,325 participants in 2011 (baseline, Time 1), 2015 (follow-up, Time 2), sociodemographic data and health factors, self-reported VI, HI, and DSI at baseline, depression, and cognitive performance after four years. A multiple mediator model was tested using bootstrapping and resampling.

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Molecular studies of Alzheimer's disease (AD) implicate potential links between autoimmunity and AD, but the underlying clinical relationships between these conditions remain poorly understood. Electronic health records (EHRs) provide an opportunity to determine the clinical risk relationship between autoimmune disorders and AD and understand whether specific disorders and disorder subtypes affect AD risk at the phenotypic level in human populations. We evaluated relationships between 26 autoimmune disorders and AD across retrospective observational case-control and cohort study designs in the EHR systems at UCSF and Stanford.

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Article Synopsis
  • Bilingualism is believed to enhance executive functioning and may delay dementia symptoms, but its effects on cognitive reserve in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) haven't been widely studied.
  • The researchers hypothesized that bilingual individuals with behavioral variant FTD would show an older age of symptom onset compared to monolinguals but didn't expect this for other types of primary progressive aphasia (PPA).
  • Contrary to expectations, the study found no significant differences in age at symptom onset or neuropsychological performance between bilingual and monolingual patients across all FTD variants, suggesting bilingualism does not provide the expected protective effect in this group.
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Radiologic usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) patterns and concordant clinical characteristics define a diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). However, limited expert access and high inter-clinician variability challenge early and pre-invasive diagnostic sensitivity and differentiation of IPF from other interstitial lung diseases (ILDs). We investigated a machine learning-driven software system, Fibresolve, to indicate IPF diagnosis in a heterogeneous group of 300 patients with interstitial lung disease work-up in a retrospective analysis of previously and prospectively collected registry data from two US clinical sites.

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Background: Weight and waist gain are significant concerns in adulthood. Both weight and waist gain are particularly important among South Asians, a high-risk group known to develop chronic cardiometabolic complications at any body mass index compared to other racial and ethnic groups.

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate factors predicting weight and waist gain in a longitudinal cohort of US South Asians, a high-risk group for developing obesity-related complications.

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The growing number of people aging with HIV represents a group vulnerable to the symptom burdens of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND). Among younger groups, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has been shown to help people living with HIV manage HIV-related and other life stress, and although there is some theoretical and empirical evidence that it may be effective among those with cognitive deficits, the approach has not been studied in older populations with HAND. Participants (n = 180) 55 years or older with HIV and cognitive impairment were randomly assigned to either an 8-week MBSR arm or a waitlist control.

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Identification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) onset risk can facilitate interventions before irreversible disease progression. We demonstrate that electronic health records from the University of California, San Francisco, followed by knowledge networks (for example, SPOKE) allow for (1) prediction of AD onset and (2) prioritization of biological hypotheses, and (3) contextualization of sex dimorphism. We trained random forest models and predicted AD onset on a cohort of 749 individuals with AD and 250,545 controls with a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic of 0.

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