Not your usual neurodegenerative disease: a case report of neuronal intranuclear inclusion disease with unconventional imaging patterns

BackgroundNeuronal intranuclear inclusion disease (NIID) is a rare neurodegenerative illness with characteristic brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) manifestations: diffuse symmetric white-matter hyperintensities in lateral cerebral ventricle areas in fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) and high-intensity signals along the corticomedullary junction of the frontal–parietal–temporal lobes in diffusion weighted imaging (DWI). Here, we report a case of adult-onset NIID who was misdiagnosed with Susac syndrome (SS) due to unusual corpus callosum imaging findings.Case presentationA 39-year-old man presented with chronic headache, blurred vision, tinnitus, and numbness in the hands as initial symptoms, accompanied by cognitive slowing and decreased memory. Brain MRI revealed round hypointense lesions on T1-weighted imaging (T1WI) and hyperintense lesions on T2WI/FLAIR/DWI in the genu and splenium of the corpus callosum. An initial diagnosis of SS was made based on the presence of the SS-typical symptoms and SS-characteristic radiology changes. Furthermore, the patient’s symptoms improved upon completion of a combined pharmacotherapy plan. However, no significant changes were evident 18 months after the brain MRI scan. Eventually, the patient was then diagnosed with NIID based on a skin biopsy and detection of expanded GGC (guanine, guanine, cytosine) repeats in the NOTCH2NLC gene.ConclusionThe present NIID case in which there was simultaneous onset of altered nervous and visual system functioning and atypical imaging findings, the atypical imaging findings may reflect an initial change of NIID leukoencephalopathy

Oak-inspired anti-biofouling shape-memory unidirectional scaffolds with stable solar water evaporation performance

Biomimetic porous materials have contributed to the enhancement of solar-driven evaporation rate in interfacial desalination and clean water production. However, due to the presence of numerous microbes in water environment, biofouling should occur inside porous materials to clog the channels for water transfer, resulting in obvious inhibition of the solar-driven evaporation efficacy in long-term use. To prevent and control biofouling in porous materials for solar-driven evaporation, a facile and environment-friendly design is required in real application. Oak wood possesses vertically aligned channels for transpiration and polyphenol compounds with antimicrobial activity. In this work, inspired by the oak wood, we developed an anti-biofouling shape-memory chitosan scaffold with unidirectional channels and tannic acid coating (oak-inspired scaffold). The shape-memory property facilitated rapid decoration with oak-inspired photothermal and anti-biofouling coating inside the scaffold, respectively, which also promotes the material durability by avoiding the external force-induced permanent structure failure. More importantly, the oak-inspired tannic acid coating not only prevented bacterial adhesion and colonization, but also inhibited fungal interference. They were subjected to a microbe-rich environment, and after 3 days, the evaporation rates of the untreated chitosan scaffolds were obviously decreased to 1.24, 1.16 and 1.19 kg m(-2) h(-1) for C. albicans, S. aureus and E. coli, respectively, which were only 65.6, 61.4 and 63.0% of original performance (1.89 kg m(-2) h(-1)). In comparison, the oak-inspired scaffold exhibited a high solar-driven water evaporation rate after incubation in microbial suspensions (1.80, 1.70 and 1.75 kg m(-2) h(-1) for C. albicans, S. aureus and E. coli after 3 days) and lake water (1.74 kg m(-2) h(-1) after one month). The bioinspired anti-biofouling scaffolds maintain as high as 86.7-91.8% of the solar-driven water evaporation ability after exposure to a microbe-rich environment, which is conducive to develop a biomimetic long-term durable structure in water treatment