Parkinson's disease: an inquiry into the etiology and treatment.

Parkinson's disease affects over one million people in the United States. Although there have been remarkable advances in uncovering the pathogenesis of this disabling disorder, the etiology is speculative. Medical treatment and operative procedures provide symptomatic relief only.

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis: a report of two fulminant cases and review of literature.

Although the prognosis of acute disseminated encephalitis (ADEM) has generally been reported as favorable, in a small subset of patients, fulminant cerebral edema requiring critical care and surgical management may develop. This article presents a 56-year-old woman who developed ADEM and died of central brain herniation secondary to medically intractable cerebral edema. Following this experience, we encountered a 32-year-old man who also developed central brain herniation despite best medical management.

Atrial fibrillation detected by mobile cardiac outpatient telemetry in cryptogenic TIA or stroke.

Objective: Atrial fibrillation (AF) may be present within a subset of patients with presumed cryptogenic TIA or stroke and remains undetected by standard diagnostic methods. We hypothesized that AF may be an under-recognized mechanism for cryptogenic TIA/stroke.

Methods: A consecutive series of 56 patients with cryptogenic TIA/stroke was analyzed after diagnostic evaluation and Mobile Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry (MCOT) for up to 21 days.

Computer-aided diagnosis with potential application to rapid detection of disease outbreaks.

Our objectives are to quickly interpret symptoms of emergency patients to identify likely syndromes and to improve population-wide disease outbreak detection. We constructed a database of 248 syndromes, each syndrome having an estimated probability of producing any of 85 symptoms, with some two-way, three-way, and five-way probabilities reflecting correlations among symptoms. Using these multi-way probabilities in conjunction with an iterative proportional fitting algorithm allows estimation of full conditional probabilities.