Establishing and Maintaining Trust: How the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Uses Strategic Communications to Build Confidence in and Disseminate Its Evidence-Based Recommendations.

In an era of conflicting health guidance and misinformation, the need for evidence-based recommendations-and clear communication about them-is critical. This paper examines the ways in which strategic communications support for the United States Preventive Services Task Force (Task Force) helps to fulfill its mission to improve the health of all people nationwide through evidence-based preventive services recommendations. This paper describes communications challenges specific to the Task Force and how its strategic communications approach helps to address them.

3T sodium MR imaging in Alzheimer's disease shows stage-dependent sodium increase influenced by age and local brain volume.

Introduction: Application of MRI in clinical routine mainly addresses structural alterations. However, pathological changes at a cellular level are expected to precede the occurrence of brain atrophy clusters and of clinical symptoms. In this context, Na-MRI examines sodium changes in the brain as a potential metabolic parameter.

Increased brain tissue sodium concentration in Friedreich ataxia: A multimodal MR imaging study.

In patients with Friedreich ataxia, structural MRI is typically used to detect abnormalities primarily in the brainstem, cerebellum, and spinal cord. The aim of the present study was to additionally investigate possible metabolic changes in Friedreich ataxia using in vivo sodium MRI that may precede macroanatomical alterations, and to explore potential associations with clinical parameters of disease progression. Tissue sodium concentration across the whole brain was estimated from sodium MRI maps acquired at 3 T and compared between 24 patients with Friedreich ataxia (21-57 years old, 13 females) and 23 controls (21-60 years old, 12 females).

The CCAS-scale in hereditary ataxias: helpful on the group level, particularly in SCA3, but limited in individual patients.

Background: A brief bedside test has recently been introduced by Hoche et al. (Brain, 2018) to screen for the Cerebellar Cognitive Affective Syndrome (CCAS) in patients with cerebellar disease.

Objective: This multicenter study tested the ability of the CCAS-Scale to diagnose CCAS in individual patients with common forms of hereditary ataxia.