1,720,998 research outputs found
CSF hypotension sindrome secondary to cervical spine manipulation
No full textNeurol Sci 26 (Suppl) Abstracts del XXXVI Congresso della Società Italiana di Neurologi
Restless legs syndrome and Parkinson's disease
No full textWe were highly surprised on reading the recent article by Peralta et al., in which an augmented prevalence of restless legs syndrome (RLS) in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) has been reported, without mentioning at all (and consequently having excluded) the well-established conditions causing secondary forms of the sensory-motor disorder, possibly occurring in the patients studied, and without including their own control population. This could have biased the results producing an overestimate of the frequency of assumed "primary" RLS in their patients, consequently corroborating the currently controversial issue of a significant comorbid association between the two disorders. Indeed, in our recently published survey on 118 PD outpatients the exclusion of secondary causes of RLS, and therefore, only considering the assumed "primary" forms of the disorder, resulted in a further reduced statistically not significant frequency of RLS in PD patients. In addition, in our study, only a limited proportion of PD patients, that is, 30 of 118 (25.4%), presented with motor fluctuations such as levodopa (L-dopa) end-of-dose deterioration, and among them only one patient, that is, 3.3%, was found suffering from assumed "primary" RLS. In contrast, the finding that in the study by Peralta et al. the majority of PD patients with RLS-like symptoms, that is 20 of 28 (71.4%), were presenting with Ldopa-related motor fluctuations or, conversely, that 28 of 75 patients, (37.3%) with motor fluctuations scored positive for RLS indicates that the occurrence of confounding conditions, that is, "mimics" of RLS, were particularly relevant in their population of PD patients. Therefore, the conclusion of the authors that their study "suggests that RLS-like symptoms are part of the sensory-motor spectrum of wearing-off in Ldopa treated PD" only confirms the well-known notion that "mimics" of RLS may confound the detection of "true" RLS in these patients, making, in our opinion, the results of their study, as well as those of some others in which the presence of motor fluctuations has not been quoted poorly reliable in supporting the comorbid association of PD and assumed "primary" RLS. Because of these considerations, it would have been preferable to have titled the paper by Peralta et al. "Restless Legs-like Syndrome in Parkinson's Disease.
Spontaneous low CSF pressure headache in Marfan syndrome. A case report
No full textNeurol Sci 25 (Suppl) Abstracts del XXXV Congresso della Società Italiana di Neurologi
Absence of co-morbidity of Parkinson disease and restless legs syndrome: a case–control study in patients attending a movement disorders clinic
No full textWe have carried out a case-control survey of the prevalence of restless legs syndrome (RLS) in 118 Parkinson's disease out-patients with different stage of disease severity by using the International restless legs syndrome Study Group clinical criteria. This study failed to demonstrate a significantly augmented prevalence of either primary and secondary restless legs syndrome pooled together or primary restless legs syndrome alone among Parkinson's disease patients as compared to age and gender matched controls. The results of our survey do not confirm a significant co-morbid occurrence of the two disorders. However, an unavoidable limitation of this and all previous studies is that most of the patients examined were already treated with dopaminomimetic drugs, which could have abolished a mild unrecognized RLS anteceding the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease or possibly masked the subsequent emergence of the sensory-motor disorder following the onset of Parkinson's disease
A study of the prevalence of restless legs syndrome in previously untreated Parkinson's disease patients: absence of co-morbid association.
No full textAbstract
OBJECTIVE: The co-morbidity between Parkinson's disease (PD) and restless legs syndrome (RLS) is currently controversial, mainly because in most of the studies so far conducted, the patients were already on therapy with dopamine(DA)ergic drugs. This study has been carried out to assess the prevalence of RLS in de novo PD patients previously unexposed to DAergic drugs.
METHODS: One hundred nine cognitively unimpaired outpatients with PD (70M/39F), mean age 66.89 years±9.37 SD were included in the study. The mean duration of PD was 15.81 months±11.24 SD, and the median Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage was 2 (range 1.5-3). All patients underwent interview to assess the occurrence of overall life-time and current "primary" form of RLS according to the criteria of the International RLS Study Group (IRLSSG). One hundred sixteen age and sex matched subjects (74M/42F, mean age 66.52.years±8.65 SD) free from a history of neurological diseases, were taken as controls and likewise interviewed. "Secondary" forms of RLS in both patients and controls were subsequently excluded.
RESULTS: No significant difference was found (chi-square test) in the frequency of overall life-time and of current "primary" RLS between PD patients and controls (6 out of 109 versus 5 out of 116 and 3 out of 109 versus 3 out of 116, respectively).
CONCLUSIONS: This survey does not support the concept of a co-morbid association between the two conditions and confirm indirectly the findings of previous studies reporting the onset of RLS after diagnosis of PD has been made in the great majority of patients and so likely on ongoing DAergic treatment. Therefore, we speculate that RLS occurring in these patients could be related to DAergic therapy for PD
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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