Does attentional dysfunction and thalamic atrophy predict decline in dementia with Lewy bodies?

Introduction: To evaluate the clinical characteristics of DLB subjects who died within 1 year of assessment compared to those who survived and investigate their patterns of in vivo regional thalamic atrophy using structural MRI.

Methods: Seventy subjects (35 DLB, 35 aged controls) underwent 3 T T1-weighted MR scanning as well as clinical and cognitive assessments, including a computerised assessment of attention. All subjects were contacted after 12 months for reassessment.

Predictors of adverse events after parotidectomy: a review of 2919 cases.

Objective: There is a current paucity of large-scale, multi-institutional studies that explore the risk factors for major complications following parotidectomy.

Methods: The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program participant use file was reviewed to identify all patients who had undergone parotidectomy between 2006 and 2011. Risk factors that predicted adverse events were estimated by using multivariate logistic regression.

Characterizing dementia with Lewy bodies by means of diffusion tensor imaging.

Objective: To investigate patterns of in vivo white matter tract change using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), we conducted a cross-sectional study of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) in comparison with Alzheimer disease (AD) and normal aging.

Methods: The study included 106 subjects (35 with DLB, 36 with AD, and 35 elderly controls) who underwent clinical and neuropsychological assessment and diffusion tensor MRI. We used tract-based spatial statistics to investigate patterns of reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) and increased mean diffusivity (MD) across the entire white matter tract skeleton and also investigated correlations with clinical features.

Factors determining the risk of inadvertent retroviral transduction of male germ cells after in utero gene transfer in sheep.

The possibility of permanent genetic changes to the germline is central to the bioethics of in utero gene therapy (IUGT) because of the concern of inadvertent potentially deleterious alterations to the gene pool. Despite presumed protection of the male germline due to early germ cell (GC) compartmentalization, we reported that GCs within the developing ovine testes are transduced at low levels after retrovirus-mediated IUGT, thus underscoring the need for a thorough understanding of GC development in clinically predictive models to determine the optimal time to perform IUGT and avoid germline modification. In the present studies, we used the fetal sheep model to analyze GCs for phenotype, location, proliferation, and incidence of transduction after IUGT at various fetal ages to learn when during development the nascent germline is likely to be at greatest risk of retrovirus-mediated alteration.