Neurology Medicine

Archive for the ‘Multiple Sclerosis’ Category

A problem in the lining of blood vessels may have to do with developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to a recent study. The condition, known as endothelial dysfunction, leading to loss of nitric oxide in the endothelium, the layer of cells lining the blood vessels. Nitric oxide is essential for the widening of blood vessels (vasodilation), which improves blood flow and oxygen delivery and nutrients to tissues.

Previous research has linked endothelial dysfunction with cardiovascular disease. In the new study, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, found that endothelial dysfunction increases the production of proteins that provide the raw material for the amyloid plaques observed in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

The findings are published online December 2 issue of Circulation Research. “As far as cardiovascular, have long known that the preservation of healthy endothelium is essential to prevent major cardiovascular events. Now it seems that this could have important implications for cognitive impairment,” he said in a news release from the American Heart Association Dr. Zvonimir S. Katusic, lead author and professor of anesthesiology and pharmacology at the Mayo Clinic.

Katusic said that the study could help explain how exercise benefits cardiovascular health and brain. Previous research has shown that exercise can delay or prevent cognitive decline.

“A lot of literature showing that every time you exercise, you stimulate the endothelium to produce more nitric oxide. What we have identified in this work may help explain the benefit (cognitive) reported the exercise,” Katusic said.

Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) have an increased risk of developing depression, according to a meta-analysis. “The results highlight the importance of screening for mood disorders in all women with PCOS,” the authors say.

But the team of Dr. Anuja Dokras, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, admits that he has too much data to back this advice. “One longitudinal study addressed this issue. Therefore, there is a tacit recommendation, but the meta-analysis suggests that we should start to be screening all women with PCOS,” said Dokras this wording.

As published by Obstetrics & Gynecology, the researchers examined the records of abnormal depression through a systematic review and meta-analysis of 13 studies on 522 women with PCOS and 475 healthy women (control group).

The risk of getting a record abnormal depression was 4.03 times higher in women with PCOS than in control groups. In five studies that controlled for body mass index, the risk of getting an abnormal record remained significantly higher (4.09 times) in women with PCOS.

This persisted regardless of the screening tool used and country of origin of the results. Dokras said that further studies to investigate the effects of thinning on the records of depression in women with PCOS.

Research in the U.S. states that HIV-infected patients are three times more likely to suffer a stroke than people not infected with the virus that causes AIDS. Scientists say they still do not know what could be the cause, but suspect it may be due to antiviral treatment taking these patients.

Another reason, they say, is because patients with HIV can now live longer thanks to these drugs and, therefore, older than the risk of stroke. “Although these therapies have greatly increased the expectations of life also could have stimulated the presence of risk factors associated with stroke, “he told BBC, Bruce Ovbiagele, a researcher who led the study.

This research, published in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology, also found that HIV patients showed an increase in the number of spills of ischemic, but not in hemorrhagic.Un ischemic stroke is caused by a clot and is the most common type of stroke.

The most common symptoms:

* Neurological symptoms that affect sensation, movement, coordination or sense organs, presented repeatedly, with a tendency to spontaneous remission and present with increased severity with each new appearance.

* Optic neuritis or retrobulbar: total or partial blindness in one or both eyes, several hours of rapid evolution. 25% of cases begin in this way ..

* Difficulty walking, double vision, dizziness, difficulty urinating, symptoms are often still in optic neuritis as the initial symptom of MS.

Neurologic Manifestations * clear: hemiplegia, paralysis, epilepsy type attacks are less frequent forms of initial presentation.

Advice for those affected Read the rest of this entry »

How is MS diagnosed?

The diagnosis must be made by the neurologist. The form of the disease usually appear to be very misleading. There are very typical startup modes: retrobulbar optic neuritis, for example (clinical picture consisting of loss of optic nerve function, with rapid onset blindness and fundus completely normal in half of cases).

But other forms of the disease (about dizziness, for example) are very little obvious and require the presence of a professional so used to seeing such problems. It is not uncommon that the diagnosis is made in the second outbreak or in the next, when someone notices the onset of neurological symptoms corresponding to various parts of the central nervous system that are appearing and submitting to the test of time.

The most important diagnostic test is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a special type of diagnostic imaging obtained with the magnetic waves pass through the body. Read the rest of this entry »

Under the name of multiple sclerosis, multiple sclerosis or poliesclerosis called a degenerative disease of the nervous system characterized by the destruction of the white substance that covers nerves, called myelin, which is replaced by sheets of connective tissue to scar type understand.

Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis

The symptoms of MS are very different, they depend on the area of the nervous system where myelin is destroyed and replaced by the useless plates. Myelin is not just a coating inactive, but that it takes the nervous current. Their destruction leads to symptoms depend on the “cutting” current caused.

Diseases of myelin

The destruction of myelin injury is called, in general, demyelinating. MS is a demyelinating disease par excellence. Another disorder that causes demyelination is cerebral infarction due to embolism, circulatory disorders in general. In hypertensive individuals without proper treatment, can cause multiple small strokes, this being a common finding in people over age 65 with untreated hypertension. MS, however, is a disease that usually begins in the first decades of life. Its frequency varies with latitude. For example, in South Africa appears in 3-10 people per 100,000, whereas in northern European countries reaches 50 cases per 100,000 people.

Evolving forms of multiple sclerosis

The disease progresses in four different ways:
1. Outbreak – remission: of the outbreak of the disease (visual disturbances, paralysis, incoordination, dizziness …) followed by a reference and a time when the disease seems silent. Approximately 35% of cases.
2. Progressive: after the first outbreak, the disease follows a progressive course. Develop this form 20% of cases.
3. Outbreak – progression: the progressive course complicated by the emergence of new growth. Suffer 45% of patients.
4. Benign minimum outbreaks, with almost total remission and no progression.

There have been enormous advances in neuroscience in general, in terms of diagnosis and treatment. Every day we learn more about Parkinson, on autoimmune diseases, non-hereditary, acquired in excess of the individual defenses, such as multiple sclerosis.

As this disease is important to note that there is no cure. The advance came mostly in the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, which is now much easier.

The international criteria for Multiple Sclerosis have changed dramatically. Also the treatment to prevent relapse of the disease, which did not exist before.

Most of the patients have relapses that can leave sequelae and to incapacitate the individual. In recent years it has been discovered that there are preventive medication for those categories critical to prevent or reduce relapses, although the disease is not curable.

Multiple Sclerosis is very broad in its appearance, one must ask what type you have to determine the treatment and how to control. The landscape has changed tremendously.