Association between gait speed deterioration and EEG abnormalities.

Physical and cognitive decline at an older age is preceded by changes that accumulate over time until they become clinically evident difficulties. These changes, frequently overlooked by patients and health professionals, may respond better than fully established conditions to strategies designed to prevent disabilities and dependence in later life. The objective of this study was twofold; to provide further support for the need to screen for early functional changes in older adults and to look for an early association between decline in mobility and cognition.

Neurophysiological features in spinocerebellar ataxia type 2: Prospects for novel biomarkers.

Electrophysiological biomarkers are useful to assess the degeneration and progression of the nervous system in pre-ataxic and ataxic stages of the Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 2 (SCA2). These biomarkers are essentially defined by their clinical significance, discriminating patients and/or preclinical subjects from healthy controls in cross-sectional studies, their significant changes over time in longitudinal studies, and their correlation with the cytosine-guanine-adenine (CAG) repeat expansion and/or clinical ataxia scores, time of evolution and time to ataxia onset. We classified electrophysiological biomarkers into three main types: (1) preclinical, (2) disease progression and (3) genetic damage.

Weight loss is correlated with disease severity in Spinocerebellar ataxia type 2: a cross-sectional cohort study.

Background: Body weight changes occur frequently during advanced stages of Spinocerebellar Ataxia type 2 (SCA2), nevertheless limited information exists on biomarkers of nutritional status of these patients.

Objective.: To assess changes in surrogate nutritional markers of SCA2 patients; to explore their associations with expanded CAG repeats and disease severity.

Prodromal Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 2 Subjects Have Quantifiable Gait and Postural Sway Deficits.

Background: The search for valid preclinical biomarkers of cerebellar dysfunction is a key research goal for the upcoming era of early interventional approaches in spinocerebellar ataxias. This study aims to describe novel preclinical biomarkers of subtle gait and postural sway abnormalities in prodromal spinocerebellar ataxia type 2 (pre-SCA2).

Methods: Thirty pre-SCA2 patients and their matched healthy controls underwent quantitative assessments of gait and postural sway using a wearable sensor-based system and semiquantitative evaluation of cerebellar features by SARA (Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia) score.

Comparing auditory steady-state responses amplitude evoked by simultaneous air- and bone-conducted stimulation in newborns.

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential interactions of the simultaneous presentation of air- and bone-conducted stimuli on auditory steady-state responses (ASSR) amplitude in newborns.

Design: Bone- and air-conducted stimuli were sinusoidal carrier tones of 500 and 2000 Hz respectively modulated in amplitude (95% depth). Air- and bone- conducted stimuli were either simultaneously recorded in the same ear using insert earphones and bone vibrator respectively, or recorded individually (single stimulation).

Timing matters: the processing of pitch relations.

The human central auditory system can automatically extract abstract regularities from a variant auditory input. To this end, temporarily separated events need to be related. This study tested whether the timing between events, falling either within or outside the temporal window of integration (~350 ms), impacts the extraction of abstract feature relations.

A formal model of interpersonal inference.

Introduction: We propose that active Bayesian inference-a general framework for decision-making-can equally be applied to interpersonal exchanges. Social cognition, however, entails special challenges. We address these challenges through a novel formulation of a formal model and demonstrate its psychological significance.

New system for neonatal hearing screening based on auditory steady state responses.

NEURONIC-A 6.0 is a system for objective detection of hearing loss by means of the recording and analysis of auditory steady state responses. The system generates digitally Amplitude Modulated tones of different frequencies, allowing the mix of these and the simultaneous presentation through different transducers (earphone and bone vibrator) at different intensities.

Bayesian M/EEG source reconstruction with spatio-temporal priors.

This article proposes a Bayesian spatio-temporal model for source reconstruction of M/EEG data. The usual two-level probabilistic model implicit in most distributed source solutions is extended by adding a third level which describes the temporal evolution of neuronal current sources using time-domain General Linear Models (GLMs). These comprise a set of temporal basis functions which are used to describe event-related M/EEG responses.

Covert matching of unfamiliar faces in a case of prosopagnosia: an ERP study.

In addition to their deficit in overt face recognition, patients with prosopagnosia also have difficulties in matching sequentially presented unfamiliar faces. Here we assessed the possibility that covert matching of faces was present in a case with prosopagnosia using event-related potentials (ERPs). The participants (patient FE and normal controls) were challenged with a face-identity matching task, in which they decided whether two sequentially presented photographs of unfamiliar faces represented the same person.

Model parameters estimation when the evoked potential recordings are affected by a random scale factor.

In many situations an important source of the average evoked potentials (EPs) variability is a random scale factor affecting each recording. As a result, the outcome of any EP detection method may be greatly affected. However, using an appropriate probabilistic model these scale factor can be estimated, and the performance of any available detection index improved by data rescaling.