A waves in electroneurography: differential diagnosis with other late responses.

Neurographic studies are an extension of clinical examination and are performed for the functional assessment of peripheral nerves. The study of motor and sensory conduction velocity and the presence, amplitude, morphology and symmetry of the response to electrical stimulation are crucial for the diagnosis and management of peripheral neuromuscular disorders. Neurography also plays an important role in the search for so-called late responses comprising the F wave, H reflex, axonal response and A wave.

A Waves in Diabetic Neuropathy: Pathophysiology and Neurographic Images.

Purpose: To evaluate the presence of A waves in diabetic neuropathy, we designed a retrospective observational study recruiting patients with type II diabetes and chronic diabetic distal sensorimotor polyneuropathy.

Methods: We recruited 238 patients of both sexes aged between 41 and 89 years. Neurography was undertaken on two bilateral upper (median and ulnar) and lower (peroneal and tibial) limb nerves.

When the word doesn't come out: A synthetic overview of dysarthria.

Motor speech disorders are common in a number of neurological conditions including diseases involving impairment of the pyramidal, extrapyramidal, and cerebellar pathways, cranial nerves, muscular apparatus, neuromuscular plaque, and of cognitive, symbolic and mnestic activities. The diagnosis of speech disorders, namely the dysarthrias, involves the assessment of characteristic structural cerebral, prosodic, phonetic and phonemic changes, often flanked by concomitant functional, clinical, neuroradiological, neurophysiological and behavioral impairment. This paper presents a brief outline of the most significant associations to facilitate prompt differential diagnosis and thereby reduce the number of instrumental examinations required for diagnostic testing.

Stabbing headache in patients with autoimmune disorders.

Stabbing headache is a relatively rare type of chronic "primary" headache with distinctive features with respect to more common forms of paroxysmal headache, such as cluster headache and trigeminal neuralgia. Drug treatment is empirical because of the lack of knowledge on the pathophysiology of stabbing headache. We examined 26 patients recruited over 10 years, who met the diagnostic criteria for stabbing headache.

The conditioned eyeblink reflex: a potential tool for the detection of cerebellar dysfunction in multiple sclerosis.

The delayed conditioned eyeblink reflex, in which an individual learns to close the eyelid in response to a conditioned stimulus (e.g. a tone) relies entirely on the functional integrity of a cerebellar motor circuitry that involves the contingent activation of Purkinje cells by parallel and climbing fibres.