Progressive loss of hearing and balance in superficial siderosis due to occult spinal dural defects.

Purpose: Superficial siderosis, a progressive, debilitating, neurological disease, often presents with bilateral impairment of auditory and vestibular function. We highlight that superficial siderosis is often due to a repairable spinal dural defect of the type that can also cause spontaneous intracranial hypotension.

Methods: Retrospective chart review of five patients presenting with moderate to severe, progressive bilateral sensorineural hearing loss as well as vestibular loss.

Sharing the load: How a personally coloured calculator for grapheme-colour synaesthetes can reduce processing costs.

Synaesthesia refers to a diverse group of perceptions. These unusual perceptions are defined by the experience of concurrents; these are conscious experiences that are catalysed by attention to some normally unrelated stimulus, the inducer. In grapheme-colour synaesthesia numbers, letters, and words can all cause colour concurrents, and these are independent of the actual colour with which the graphemes are displayed.

The neuro-otology of Susac syndrome.

Objective: We characterised the clinical and neuro-otological characteristics of patients with Susac syndrome.

Methods: The medical records of 30 patients with Susac syndrome were reviewed for details of their clinical presentation and course, neuro-otological symptoms, investigation results including audiology and vestibular function tests, treatment and outcomes.

Results: Our findings demonstrate that 29 of our 30 patients with Susac syndrome developed neuro-otological symptoms such as hearing loss, disequilibrium, tinnitus or vertigo during their disease course.

Substantiating synesthesia: a novel aid in a case of grapheme-colour synesthesia and concomitant dyscalculia.

Here we present the case of SP, a 21-year-old female with life-long dyscalculia. SP was subsequently diagnosed with grapheme-color synesthesia, a diagnosis that serendipitously catalyzed our development of a novel aid:The digit-color calculator (DCC). The DCC substantiates SP's color , dramatically ameliorating her difficulties with basic calculations.

If Time Is Brain Where Is the Improvement in Prehospital Time after Stroke?

Despite the availability of thrombolytic and endovascular therapy for acute ischemic stroke, many patients are ineligible due to delayed hospital arrival. The identification of factors related to either early or delayed hospital arrival may reveal potential targets of intervention to reduce prehospital delay and improve access to time-critical thrombolysis and clot retrieval therapy. Here, we have reviewed studies reporting on factors associated with either early or delayed hospital arrival after stroke, together with an analysis of stroke onset to hospital arrival times.

Testing the importance of the Medial Temporal Lobes in human interoception: Does it matter if there is a memory component to the task?

Interoception is the ability to consciously perceive internal bodily states. Neuroimaging suggests that the insula (IC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) mediate interoception, while studies involving patients/animals with brain lesions suggest the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is particularly important. One reason for these contrasting conclusions may lie in the types of interoceptive task used by these different approaches.

Observer-independent analysis of high-resolution MR images of the human cerebral cortex: in vivo delineation of cortical areas.

Using high-resolution MRI, it is now possible to examine the living human cortex down to a resolution of less than 300 mum. Thus, in vivo imaging is now approaching the resolution that has been successfully used in histological analysis of the cerebral cortex for many years, e.g.

Neuropsychological and psychiatric outcomes following coronary surgery or angioplasty: a comparative study.

Background: Medical outcomes following coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) or percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) are similar, but few studies have compared neuropsychological outcomes after these procedures.

Methods: A retrospective study compared detailed neurocognitive and psychosocial functioning in 32 patients (CABG, n = 16; PTCA, n = 16) aged 61 +/- 6 years, 9-15 months after coronary revascularisation. Subjects were tested for executive functioning, speed of processing/attention and learning/memory, significant psychopathology (General Health Questionnaire, GHQ) and psychosocial functioning (Short Form (SF)-36 health survey).

A role for the thalamus in memory for unique entities.

Recent case studies of amnesic patients have yielded patterns of impairment that challenge Tulving's (1972) division of retrograde memory into two categories (namely, episodic and semantic memory). Here we describe a patient (JG) who developed partially blocked access to previously stored knowledge following the onset of a medial thalamic infarction. Having previously demonstrated that JG has a dense, pervasive amnesia for autobiographical material, famous people and famous events (Miller et al.

Real and imaginary rotary motion processing: functional parcellation of the human parietal lobe revealed by fMRI.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed in 16 healthy subjects while they undertook orientation discrimination tasks of real rotating and mentally rotating alphanumeric characters. Perception of rotating and stationary abstract characters was also performed. Mental rotation and the perception of alphanumeric characters undergoing real rotation activated equivalent cortical areas, in keeping with the analogue hypothesis of mental rotation.

High-resolution MRI reflects myeloarchitecture and cytoarchitecture of human cerebral cortex.

Maps of cytoarchitectonically defined cortical areas have proven to be a valuable tool for anatomic localization of activated brain regions revealed by functional imaging studies. However, architectonic data require observations in a sample of postmortem brains. They can only be used reliably for comparison with functional data as probabilistic maps after spatial normalization to a common reference space.

In vivo identification of human cortical areas using high-resolution MRI: an approach to cerebral structure-function correlation.

Understanding the relationship between the structural and functional organization of the human brain is one of the most important goals of neuroscience. Individual variability in brain structure means that it is essential to obtain this information from the same subject. To date, this has been almost impossible.

Widespread dorsal stream activation during a parametric mental rotation task, revealed with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Following a parametrically modulated mental rotation task, in which 10 healthy subjects were instructed to determine whether alphanumeric characters were normal or mirror-reversed, bilateral dorsal stream activations culminating in the intraparietal region were revealed with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Although the parietal activations were bilateral, we observed a right hemispheric dominance for the task, consistent with our previous findings (I. M.