Two Patients with Therapy-Resistant Pemphigus Vulgaris and Severe Underlying Disease Showing Good Response to a New IVIg Preparation.

Pemphigus vulgaris is a severe and often therapy-resistant bullous autoimmune disease. Standard therapy with steroids often administered together with another immunosuppressant does not respond in all patients or may not be a good therapeutic option in patients with severe underlying diseases. Intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIgs) represent a treatment alternative, often showing a rapid response which allows one to reduce concomitant immunosuppression.

Morphology-dependent Li ion dynamics in X-ray amorphous and crystalline LiPS prepared by solvent-assisted synthesis.

Solid-state electrolytes with high ionic conductivity will be crucial for future energy storage systems. Among many possible materials, thiophosphates offer both favourable mechanical properties and fast ionic transport. β-LiPS, as a member of the thiophosphate family, has gained recent attention, due to its remarkable increase in Li ionic conductivity when prepared solvent-assisted synthesis.

Ionic Conductivity of Nanocrystalline and Amorphous LiGePS: The Detrimental Impact of Local Disorder on Ion Transport.

Solids with extraordinarily high Li dynamics are key for high performance all-solid-state batteries. The thiophosphate LiGePS (LGPS) belongs to the best Li-ion conductors with an ionic conductivity exceeding 10 mS cm at ambient temperature. Recent molecular dynamics simulations performed by Dawson and Islam predict that the ionic conductivity of LGPS can be further enhanced by a factor of 3 if local disorder is introduced.

Opening Diffusion Pathways through Site Disorder: The Interplay of Local Structure and Ion Dynamics in the Solid Electrolyte LiPGeSI as Probed by Neutron Diffraction and NMR.

Solid electrolytes are at the heart of future energy storage systems. Li-bearing argyrodites are frontrunners in terms of Li ion conductivity. Although many studies have investigated the effect of elemental substitution on ionic conductivity, we still do not fully understand the various origins leading to improved ion dynamics.

With a Little Help from P NMR: The Complete Picture on Localized and Long-Range Li Diffusion in LiPSI.

LiPSI acts as a perfect model substance to study length scale-dependent diffusion parameters in an ordered matrix. It provides Li-rich cages which offer rapid but localized Li translational jump processes. As jumps between these cages are assumed to be much less frequent, long-range ion transport is sluggish, resulting in ionic conductivities in the order of 10 S cm at room temperature.

Prognostic value of changes in high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T beyond biological variation in stable outpatients with cardiovascular disease: a validation study.

Objective: To evaluate the prognostic implications of longitudinal long-term changes beyond the biological variation of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T (hs-cTnT) in outpatients with stable or asymptomatic cardiovascular disease (CV) and to assess possible differences in the prognostic value while using reference change value (RCV) and minimal important differences (MID) as metric for biological variation.

Methods: Hs-cTnT was measured at index visit and after 12 months in outpatients presenting for routine follow-up. The prognostic relevance of a concentration change of hs-cTnT values exceeding the biological variation defined by RCV and MID of a healthy population within the next 12 months following the stable initial period was determined regarding three endpoints: all-cause mortality (EP1), a composite of all-cause mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction and stroke (EP2), and a composite of all-cause mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke, hospitalization for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) or decompensated heart failure, and planned and unplanned percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI, EP3).

Isolable Geminal Bisgermenolates: A New Synthon in Organometallic Chemistry.

We have synthesized the first isolable geminal bisenolates LKGe[(CO)R] (=2,4,6-trimethylphenyl (,), L=THF for () or [18]-crown-6 for ()), a new synthon for the synthesis of organometallic reagents. The formation of these derivatives was confirmed by NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallographic analysis. The UV/Vis spectra of these anions show three distinct bands, which were assigned by DFT calculations.

Isolable Geminal Bisgermenolates: A New Synthon in Organometallic Chemistry.

We have synthesized the first isolable geminal bisenolates L K Ge[(CO)R] (R=2,4,6-trimethylphenyl (2 a,b), L=THF for (2 a) or [18]-crown-6 for (2 b)), a new synthon for the synthesis of organometallic reagents. The formation of these derivatives was confirmed by NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallographic analysis. The UV/Vis spectra of these anions show three distinct bands, which were assigned by DFT calculations.

Conductor-Insulator Interfaces in Solid Electrolytes: A Design Strategy to Enhance Li-Ion Dynamics in Nanoconfined LiBH/AlO.

Synthesizing Li-ion-conducting solid electrolytes with application-relevant properties for new energy storage devices is a challenging task that relies on a few design principles to tune ionic conductivity. When starting with originally poor ionic compounds, in many cases, a combination of several strategies, such as doping or substitution, is needed to achieve sufficiently high ionic conductivities. For nanostructured materials, the introduction of conductor-insulator interfacial regions represents another important design strategy.

Nonverbal Semantics Test (NVST)-A Novel Diagnostic Tool to Assess Semantic Processing Deficits: Application to Persons with Aphasia after Cerebrovascular Accident.

Assessment of semantic processing capacities often relies on verbal tasks which are, however, sensitive to impairments at several language processing levels. Especially for persons with aphasia there is a strong need for a tool that measures semantic processing skills independent of verbal abilities. Furthermore, in order to assess a patient's potential for using alternative means of communication in cases of severe aphasia, semantic processing should be assessed in different nonverbal conditions.

Tracking Ions the Direct Way: Long-Range Li Dynamics in the Thio-LISICON Family LiMCh (M = Sn, Ge; Ch = S, Se) as Probed by Li NMR Relaxometry and Li Spin-Alignment Echo NMR.

Solid electrolytes are key elements for next-generation energy storage systems. To design powerful electrolytes with high ionic conductivity, we need to improve our understanding of the mechanisms that are at the heart of the rapid ion exchange processes in solids. Such an understanding also requires evaluation and testing of methods not routinely used to characterize ion conductors.

Evaluating Models of Gesture and Speech Production for People With Aphasia.

People with aphasia use gestures not only to communicate relevant content but also to compensate for their verbal limitations. The Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2000) assumes a flexible relationship between gesture and speech with the possibility of a compensatory use of the two modalities. In the successor of the Sketch Model, the AR-Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2017), the relationship between iconic gestures and speech is no longer assumed to be flexible and compensatory, but instead iconic gestures are assumed to express information that is redundant to speech.

The Production of Gesture and Speech by People With Aphasia: Influence of Communicative Constraints.

Purpose People with aphasia (PWA) use different kinds of gesture spontaneously when they communicate. Although there is evidence that the nature of the communicative task influences the linguistic performance of PWA, so far little is known about the influence of the communicative task on the production of gestures by PWA. We aimed to investigate the influence of varying communicative constraints on the production of gesture and spoken expression by PWA in comparison to persons without language impairment.

It takes two to pantomime: Communication meets motor cognition.

For over a century, pantomime of tool use has been employed to diagnose limb apraxia, a disorder of motor cognition primarily induced by left brain damage. While research consistently implicates damage to a left fronto-temporo-parietal network in limb apraxia, findings are inconsistent regarding the impact of damage to anterior versus posterior nodes within this network on pantomime. Complicating matters is the fact that tool use pantomime can be affected and evaluated at multiple levels.

Comprehensibility and neural substrate of communicative gestures in severe aphasia.

Communicative gestures can compensate incomprehensibility of oral speech in severe aphasia, but the brain damage that causes aphasia may also have an impact on the production of gestures. We compared the comprehensibility of gestural communication of persons with severe aphasia and non-aphasic persons and used voxel based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) to determine lesion sites that are responsible for poor gestural expression in aphasia. On group level, persons with aphasia conveyed more information via gestures than controls indicating a compensatory use of gestures in persons with severe aphasia.

How Much Information Do People With Aphasia Convey via Gesture?

Purpose: People with aphasia (PWA) face significant challenges in verbally expressing their communicative intentions. Different types of gestures are produced spontaneously by PWA, and a potentially compensatory function of these gestures has been discussed. The current study aimed to investigate how much information PWA communicate through 3 types of gesture and the communicative effectiveness of such gestures.

Co-speech hand movements during narrations: What is the impact of right vs. left hemisphere brain damage?

Persons with brain damage show deviant patterns of co-speech hand movement behaviour in comparison to healthy speakers. It has been claimed by several authors that gesture and speech rely on a single production mechanism that depends on the same neurological substrate while others claim that both modalities are closely related but separate production channels. Thus, findings so far are contradictory and there is a lack of studies that systematically analyse the full range of hand movements that accompany speech in the condition of brain damage.

Non-verbal communication in severe aphasia: influence of aphasia, apraxia, or semantic processing?

Patients suffering from severe aphasia have to rely on non-verbal means of communication to convey a message. However, to date it is not clear which patients are able to do so. Clinical experience indicates that some patients use non-verbal communication strategies like gesturing very efficiently whereas others fail to transmit semantic content by non-verbal means.