[Non-aphasic misnaming: a case report and literature review].

A 71-year-old, right-handed woman was admitted to our hospital due to a sudden difficulty with conversation. On admission, she was alert, but had a euphoric mood, disorientation, and a disturbance of recent memory. Her speech was fluent. Her repetition and auditory word cognition were excellent, but she had a slight difficulty with naming visual objects. She frequently showed word-finding difficulty and irrelevant paraphasia during free conversation and a word fluency task. Her irrelevant paraphasia was observed more frequently when she was asked to explain her outbreak of anger at the hospital, i.e., it was situation-dependent. She also had anosognosia. MRI showed an infarct in the territory of the left tuberothalamic artery. Single-photon emission computed tomography revealed low-uptake lesions in the left thalamus and orbital frontal, medial frontal, and medial temporal lobes. The patient was diagnosed with non-aphasic misnaming. The clinical characteristics of patients with non-aphasic misnaming in the literature were reviewed. All of the patients with non-aphasic misnaming had word-finding difficulty and irrelevant paraphasia. Additionally, they had either emotional disturbance or anosognosia.

HSP70 inducers from Chinese herbs and their effect on melanin production.

Skin hyperpigmentation disorders as a result of abnormal melanin production induced by ultraviolet (UV) irradiation are both a clinical and a cosmetic problem. This melanin production is mediated by tyrosinase whose expression is positively regulated by microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF). We recently found that expression of heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) inhibits melanin production. In this study, we searched for HSP70 inducers from Chinese herbs and selected an ethanol extract of Eupatorium lindleyanum (E. lindleyanum). Not only melanin production but also the activity and expression of tyrosinase were significantly suppressed in cells treated with E. lindleyanum extract as well as in HSP70-overexpressing cells. The expression of MITF was clearly suppressed in cells treated with E. lindleyanum extract but not in HSP70-overexpressing cells. These results suggest that E. lindleyanum extract suppresses the expression of tyrosinase and melanin production through both HSP70-dependent and HSP70-independent mechanisms.

Cerebral substrates related to impaired performance in the clock-drawing test in dementia with Lewy bodies.

AIMS: To identify the neural correlates of impaired performance in the clock-drawing test (CDT) in patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). METHODS: Cerebral blood flow was measured by single photon emission computed tomography in patients with clinically diagnosed DLB, and was compared between impaired CDT (n = 30) and normal CDT (n = 30) subgroups. RESULTS: DLB patients with impaired CDT performance showed significantly lower cerebral blood flow in the bilateral frontal eye fields, supplementary eye fields, right posterior putamen and the right ventrolateral part of the thalamus relative to the normal CDT subgroup. Performance in other visuospatial/attentional tasks (trail making test part A, copying a cube, semantic fluency, and block design) was also poorer in the impaired CDT group than the normal CDT group. CONCLUSIONS: This study indicates that impaired performances on the CDT and some visuospatial/attentional tasks by DLB patients are closely related to dysfunctions of the frontal-subcortical network relevant to control of visuospatial attention and arousal, involving the frontal eye fields, supplementary eye fields and the thalamus. Our findings provide evidence that cognitive performance in DLB reflects the pathological involvement of both cortical and subcortical regions, and suggest that the neurophysiological basis underlying impaired CDT in DLB may be different from that in Alzheimer disease.