A case report of superficial siderosis of the central nervous system and literature review.

Superficial siderosis of the central nervous system (SSCNS) is a rare disease characterized by iron deposition on the tissue surface of the middle axis system. We report the case of a man in his late 40 s who was admitted to the hospital with ataxia. A physical examination revealed cerebellar ataxia, sensorineural deafness, and bilateral pyramidal tract injury. Susceptibility-weighted magnetic resonance imaging showed linear hypointense signals on the surface of the cerebral hemispheres, sulcus gyrus, lateral ventricles, and cerebellum. The patient underwent treatment with deferiprone, mecobalamin, and vitamin B1, and the symptoms were not aggravated. The patient's daily living ability was near normal after 1 year of follow-up. A literature review indicated that most SSCNS patients present diverse clinical manifestations. Clinicians may consider SSCNS in patients with hearing impairment and gait ataxia, especially for those receiving anticoagulant therapy and with a history of brain injury or accident.

Dendrobium Nobile Polysaccharides Attenuates Ferroptosis and Improves Cognitive Function in Vascular Dementia Rats.

INTRODUCTION: To investigate the neuroprotective effect and mechanism of Dendrobium nobile polysaccharide (DNP) on vascular dementia (VD) rats. METHODS: VD model rats were prepared by permanent ligation of bilateral common carotid arteries. Cognitive function was tested by morris water maze test, mitochondrial morphology and ultrastructure of hippocampal synapses were tested by transmission electron microscopy, GSH, xCT, GPx4, and PSD-95 expressions were tested by western blot and PCR. RESULTS: The number of platform crossing was significantly increased, and the escape latency was significantly shorter in DNP group. The expressions of GSH, xCT and GPx4 in the hippocampus were up-regulated in DNP group. Moreover, the synapses of DNP group were relatively intact and synaptic vesicles increased, the length of synaptic active zone and PSD thickness were significantly increased, and PSD-95 protein expression was significantly up-regulated compared VD group. CONCLUSION: DNP may take a neuroprotective effect by inhibiting ferroptosis in VD.

Factors associated with health-related quality of life among family caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease.

AIM: Based on the ageing population and the inadequate healthcare system in China, the majority of care for patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is provided by family caregivers. Caregivers suffer a long-term heavy care burden and pressure, which affects their physical and mental health. The present study aims at investigating health-related quality of life (HRQOL) among family caregivers of AD patients and exploring its influencing factors. METHODS: This study included 206 family caregivers (76 male, 130 female) of AD patients recruited from one Tier 3 hospital, one psychiatric hospital, two gerocomiums and three communities in Ganzhou city, Jiangxi Province, China. Measures included the World Health Organization (WHO) Quality of Life (WHO/ QOL-BREF) questionnaire, Zarit burden of care scale (ZBI), and social support rating scale (SSRS).We performed face-to-face or telephone interviews with patients and caregivers. The association between possible factors and changes in HRQOL was examined through stepwise multiple regression analysis. RESULTS: The majority of family caregivers felt moderate to severe level of burden. The average HRQOL score was 54.24 ± 10.36. The mean SSRS score was 30.4 ± 10.9. The average ZBI score was 41.2 ± 12.8. The HRQOL of family caregivers of AD patients was negatively correlated with the neuropsychiatric questionnaire score, ZBI score, and chronic diseases of caregivers (P < 0.05), and positively correlated with the SSRS score (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Reduced QOL was highly prevalent among AD patient family caregivers, and the level of burden, neuropsychiatric symptoms of patients, social support, and chronic diseases of caregivers were factors associated with HRQOL, and the effect of care burden is greatest. Interventions aimed at reducing the level of burden should focus not only on the patient but also on the caregiver.

Automatic thickness estimation for skeletal muscle in ultrasonography: evaluation of two enhancement methods.

BACKGROUND: Ultrasonography is a convenient technique to investigate muscle properties and has been widely used to look into muscle functions since it is non-invasive and real-time. Muscle thickness, a quantification which can effectively reflect the muscle activities during muscle contraction, is an important measure for musculoskeletal studies using ultrasonography. The traditional manual operation to read muscle thickness is subjective and time-consuming, therefore a number of studies have focused on the automatic estimation of muscle fascicle orientation and muscle thickness, to which the speckle noises in ultrasound images could be the major obstacle. There have been two popular methods proposed to enhance the hyperechoic regions over the speckles in ultrasonography, namely Gabor Filtering and Multiscale Vessel Enhancement Filtering (MVEF). METHODS: A study on gastrocnemius muscle is conducted to quantitatively evaluate whether and how these two methods could help the automatic estimation of the muscle thickness based on Revoting Hough Transform (RVHT). The muscle thickness results obtained from each of the two methods are compared with the results from manual measurement, respectively. Data from an aged subject with cerebral infarction is also studied. RESULTS: It's shown in the experiments that, Gabor Filtering and MVEF can both enable RVHT to generate comparable results of muscle thickness to those by manual drawing (mean ± SD, 1.45 ± 0.48 and 1.38 ± 0.56 mm respectively). However, the MVEF method requires much less computation than Gabor Filtering. CONCLUSIONS: Both methods, as preprocessing procedure can enable RVHT the automatic estimation of muscle thickness and MVEF is believed to be a better choice for real-time applications.