The present report highlights a case of successful treatment of an 11-year-old male patient who presented with an atlanto-occipital dislocation and multiple fractures of the forearm, pelvis, and lower leg because of a fall. The patient experienced dysarthria and paralysis of the tongue, which became completely immobile and could not be moved from side to side, impeding speech. The patient also experienced dysphagia due to the inability to propel food toward the pharynx and chewing attempts resulted in scattering of food residue throughout the oral cavity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Prosopagnosia is a rare form of apraxia, in which a person has normal memory and vision, but has impaired cognition of human faces that are manifested through symptoms such as not being able to recognize the face of a familiar person, one has known or not being able to remember the face of a person. Here, we report the case of a patient with transient prosopagnosia associated with brain metastasis from epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-mutated lung adenocarcinoma who was treated with tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs).
Case Description: A 52-year-old right-handed man with lung adenocarcinoma was introduced to our department because brain metastasis.
We examined the transcriptional regulation of the activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein gene (Arc), focusing on BDNF-induced Arc expression in cultured rat cortical cells. Although the synaptic activity-responsive element (SARE), located -7 kbp upstream of the Arc transcription start site, responded to NMDA, BDNF, or FGF2, the proximal region of the promoter (Arc/-1679) was activated by BDNF or FGF2, but not by NMDA, suggesting the presence of at least two distinct Arc promoter regions, distal and proximal, that respond to extracellular stimuli. Specificity protein 4 (SP4) and early growth response 1 (EGR1) controlled Arc/-1679 transcriptional activity via the region encompassing -169 to -37 of the Arc promoter.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA growing body of recent evidence indicates that ATP plays an important role in neuronal-glial communications. In this study, the authors demonstrated that extracellular ATP elicits the gene expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), especially BDNF exon IV mRNA, in primary cultured rat cortical astrocytes but not in neurons. To investigate the mechanism by which ATP induces BDNF exon IV mRNA expression, the authors used immortalized astrocyte cell line RCG-12.
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