Staging Parkinson's disease according to the MNCD classification correlates with caregiver burden.

Background And Objective: Recently, we demonstrated that staging Parkinson's disease (PD) with a novel simple classification called MNCD, based on four axes (motor, non-motor, cognition, and dependency) and five stages, correlated with disease severity and patients' quality of life. Here, we analyzed the correlation of MNCD staging with PD caregiver's status.

Patients And Methods: Data from the baseline visit of PD patients and their principal caregiver recruited from 35 centers in Spain from the COPPADIS cohort from January 2016 to November 2017 were used to apply the MNCD total score (from 0 to 12) and MNCD stages (from 1 to 5) in this cross-sectional analysis.

Sleep Problems Are Related to a Worse Quality of Life and a Greater Non-Motor Symptoms Burden in Parkinson's Disease.

Introduction: The aim of the present study was to examine the frequency of self-reported sleep problems and their associated factors in a large cohort of PD patients.

Methods: PD patients and controls, recruited from 35 centers of Spain from the COPPADIS cohort were included in this cross-sectional study. Sleep problems were assessed by the Spanish version of the Parkinson's disease Sleep Scale version 1 (PDSS-1).

Climate change accelerates growth of urban trees in metropolises worldwide.

Despite the importance of urban trees, their growth reaction to climate change and to the urban heat island effect has not yet been investigated with an international scope. While we are well informed about forest growth under recent conditions, it is unclear if this knowledge can be simply transferred to urban environments. Based on tree ring analyses in ten metropolises worldwide, we show that, in general, urban trees have undergone accelerated growth since the 1960s.

Enzymatic defects of the nsP2 proteins of Semliki Forest virus temperature-sensitive mutants.

We have analyzed the biochemical consequences of mutations that affect viral RNA synthesis in Semliki Forest virus temperature-sensitive (ts) mutants. Of the six mutations mapping in the multifunctional replicase protein nsP2, three were located in the N-terminal helicase region and three were in the C-terminal protease domain. Wild-type and mutant nsP2s were expressed, purified, and assayed for nucleotide triphosphatase (NTPase), RNA triphosphatase (RTPase), and protease activities in vitro at 24 degrees C and 35 degrees C.