The life and letters of George Bancroft,

"A bibliography of books and pamphlets by George Bancroft, comp. by Henry C. Strippel ...": v. 2, p. [329]-341.Mode of access: Internet.Bancroft A24.M4 no.67: From the Irving Stone Collectio

Increased Intrathecal B and Plasma Cells in Patients With Anti-IgLON5 Disease:A Case Series

Background and Objectives: Despite detection of autoantibodies, anti-IgLON5 disease was historically considered a tau-associated neurodegenerative disease, with limited treatment options and detrimental consequences for the patients. Observations in increasing case numbers hint toward underlying inflammatory mechanisms that, early detection provided, open a valuable window of opportunity for therapeutic intervention. We aimed to further substantiate this view by studying the CSF of patients with anti-IgLON5. Methods: We identified 11 patients with anti-IgLON5 from our database and compared clinical, MRI, and CSF findings with a cohort of 20 patients with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) (as a noninflammatory tauopathy) and 22 patients with functional neurologic disorder. Results: Patients with anti-IgLON5 show inflammatory changes in routine CSF analysis, an increase in B-lymphocyte frequency, and the presence of plasma cells in comparison to the PSP-control group and functional neurologic disease controls. Patients with intrathecal plasma cells showed a clinical response to rituximab. Discussion: Our findings indicate the importance of inflammatory mechanisms, in particular in early and acute anti-IgLON5 cases, which may support the use of immune-suppressive treatments in these cases. The main limitation of the study is the small number of cases due to the rarity of the disease

Classification of neurological diseases using multi-dimensional cerebrospinal fluid analysis

Although CSF analysis routinely enables the diagnosis of neurological diseases, it is mainly used for the gross distinction between infectious, autoimmune inflammatory, and degenerative disorders of the CNS. To investigate, whether a multi-dimensional cellular blood and CSF characterization can support the diagnosis of clinically similar neurological diseases, we analysed 546 patients with autoimmune neuroinflammatory, degenerative, or vascular conditions in a cross-sectional retrospective study. By combining feature selection with dimensionality reduction and machine learning approaches we identified pan-disease parameters that were altered across all autoimmune neuroinflammatory CNS diseases and differentiated them from other neurological conditions and inter-autoimmunity classifiers that subdifferentiate variants of CNS-directed autoimmunity. Pan-disease as well as diseases-specific changes formed a continuum, reflecting clinical disease evolution. A validation cohort of 231 independent patients confirmed that combining multiple parameters into composite scores can assist the classification of neurological patients. Overall, we showed that the integrated analysis of blood and CSF parameters improves the differential diagnosis of neurological diseases, thereby facilitating early treatment decisions