Clinical Characteristics of Functional Movement Disorders: A Clinic-based Study

Background: Functional movement disorders are recognized as a “crisis” in neurology. We aimed to determine the rate of incidence of functional movement disorder patients at a university outpatient neurology clinic in South Korea, and highlight the clinical and phenomenological characteristics. Methods: Patients who were assessed by a movement disorders neurologist at a university hospital between March 2016 and May 2017 were screened for functional movement disorders. Demographic and clinical data were reviewed, and the phenomenology of movements was studied. Results: Of 321 patients evaluated for the chief complaint of a movement abnormality, approximately 10% (31 patients) were diagnosed with a functional movement disorder. The female to male ratio was 7:1 (27 females to four males). The mean age at presentation was 53 years (standard error 3.6 years), and the mean disease duration was 5 years (standard error 1.4 years). Sixty-one percent (19 out of 31 patients) had a past medical history of depression, anxiety, or other psychiatric illnesses. Tremor and speech abnormalities were most prevalent (19 and 12 patients, respectively). Onset was reported to be abrupt in 14 patients (45%). Thirteen (42%) patients were found to have improvement at a follow-up visit, 10 (32%) had no improvement, and eight (26%) were lost to follow-up. Discussion: Functional movement disorders are not uncommon in the outpatient neurology clinic. Our results confirm that tremor is the most frequent movement occurring in functional movement disorders, and the most commonly affected body parts were found to be the upper and lower extremities. Speech was also found to be frequently involved (39%). Patients with no improvement at follow-up had longer mean disease duration (6.2 years), consistent with previous observations that prolonged symptom duration is associated with poor clinical outcome. Our study results obtained from a Korean population suggest that previous observations on functional movement disorders from other regions hold true in Eastern Asia

Mixed-State Entanglement and Quantum Teleportation through Noisy Channels

The quantum teleportation with noisy EPR state is discussed. Using an optimal decomposition technique, we compute the concurrence, entanglement of formation and Groverian measure for various noisy EPR resources. It is shown analytically that all entanglement measures reduce to zero when $\bar{F} \leq 2/3$, where $\bar{F}$ is an average fidelity between Alice and Bob. This fact indicates that the entanglement is a genuine physical resource for the teleportation process. This fact gives valuable clues on the optimal decomposition for higher-qubit mixed states. As an example, the optimal decompositions for the three-qubit mixed states are discussed by adopting a teleportation with W-stateComment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Tripartite Entanglement in Noninertial Frame

The tripartite entanglement is examined when one of the three parties moves with a uniform acceleration with respect to other parties. As Unruh effect indicates, the tripartite entanglement exhibits a decreasing behavior with increasing the acceleration. Unlike the bipartite entanglement, however, the tripartite entanglement does not completely vanish in the infinite acceleration limit. If the three parties, for example, share the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger or W-state initially, the corresponding $\pi$-tangle, one of the measures for tripartite entanglement, is shown to be $\pi/6 \sim 0.524$ or 0.176 in this limit, respectively. This fact indicates that the tripartite quantum information processing may be possible even if one of the parties approaches to the Rindler horizon. The physical implications of this striking result are discussed in the context of black hole physics.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure

Parkinsonism and Tremor in a Patient with Plasmodium vivax Malaria

Background: A 57-year-old male diagnosed with Plasmodium vivax malaria presented with a subacute onset of hand tremor, slowness, and gait difficulty. Phenomenology: A bilateral upper extremity kinetic tremor was seen, as well as a right upper extremity rigidity and body bradykinesia. Educational Value: Parkinsonism and tremor are neurological manifestations that may occur in malaria as a result of globus pallidi and dentate nuclei involvement

Social Data Visualization System for Understanding Diffusion Patterns on Twitter: A Case Study on Korean Enterprises

Online social media have been playing an important role of creating and diffusing information to many users. It means the users can get cognitive influence to the other users. Thus, it is important to understand how the information can be diffused by interactions among users through online social media. In this paper, we design a social media monitoring system (called "TweetPulse'') which can analyze and show meaningful diffusion patterns (DP) among the users. Particularly, TweetPulse focuses on visualizing information diffusion in Twitter, given a certain time duration. Also, this work has investigated the relationships 1) between DP and event detecting, 2) between DP and emotional words, and 3) between DP and the number of followers of the users. Thereby, to understand the continuous patterns of the information diffusion, we propose two different types of analytic methods, which are 1) macroscopic approach and 2) microscopic approach. For evaluating the proposed method, we have collected and preprocessed the dataset during about 4 months (14 March 2012 to 12 July 2012). As a conclusion, TweetPulse has helped users to easily understand DP from a large scale dataset streaming through Twitter

The Stigma of Migraine

Background People who have a disease often experience stigma, a socially and culturally embedded process through which individuals experience stereotyping, devaluation, and discrimination. Stigma has great impact on quality of life, behavior, and life chances. We do not know whether or not migraine is stigmatizing. Methods We studied 123 episodic migraine patients, 123 chronic migraine patients, and 62 epilepsy patients in a clinical setting to investigate the extent to which stigma attaches to migraine, using epilepsy as a comparison. We used the stigma scale for chronic illness, a 24-item questionnaire suitable for studying chronic neurologic diseases, and various disease impact measures. Results Patients with chronic migraine had higher scores (54.0±20.2) on the stigma scale for chronic illness than either episodic migraine (41.7±14.8) or epilepsy patients (44.6±16.3) (p\u3c0.001). Subjects with migraine reported greater inability to work than epilepsy subjects. Stigma correlated most strongly with the mental component score of the short form of the medical outcomes health survey (SF-12), then with ability to work and migraine disability score for chronic and episodic migraine and the Liverpool impact on epilepsy scale for epilepsy. Analysis of covariance showed adjusted scores for the stigma scale for chronic illness were similar for chronic migraine (49.3; 95% confidence interval, 46.2 to 52.4) and epilepsy (46.5; 95% confidence interval, 41.6 to 51.6), and lower for episodic migraine (43.7; 95% confidence interval, 40.9 to 46.6). Ability to work was the strongest predictor of stigma as measured by the stigma scale for chronic illness. Conclusion In our model, adjusted stigma was similar for chronic migraine and epilepsy, which were greater than for episodic migraine. Stigma correlated most strongly with inability to work, and was greater for chronic migraine than epilepsy or episodic migraine because chronic migraine patients had less ability to work

Aharonov-Bohm-Coulomb Problem in Graphene Ring

We study the Aharonov-Bohm-Coulomb problem in a graphene ring. We investigate, in particular, the effects of a Coulomb type potential of the form $\xi/r$ on the energy spectrum of Dirac electrons in the graphene ring in two different ways: one for the scalar coupling and the other for the vector coupling. It is found that, since the potential in the scalar coupling breaks the time-reversal symmetry between the two valleys as well as the effective time-reversal symmetry in a single valley, the energy spectrum of one valley is separated from that of the other valley, demonstrating a valley polarization. In the vector coupling, however, the potential does not break either of the two symmetries and its effect appears only as an additive constant to the spectrum of Aharonov-Bohm potential. The corresponding persistent currents, the observable quantities of the symmetry-breaking energy spectra, are shown to be asymmetric about zero magnetic flux in the scalar coupling, while symmetric in the vector coupling.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures (V2) 18 pages, accepted in JPHYS

Self-Assembled Charged Hydrogels Control the Alignment of Filamentous Actin

We demonstrate a novel route to control attachment of filamentous actin (F-actin) on hydrogel films. By incorporating an amine-terminated silane, the hydrogel surface charge and surface topography are varied. With increasing silane content, F-actin reorients from perpendicular to parallel to the hydrogel surface, ceases to wobble, and forms mainly elongated or cyclic structures. F-Actin coverage reaches a maximum at 2.5 vol% silane and declines at higher silane content. This biphasic behavior is explained by the simultaneous increase in surface charge and the self-assembly of a micron scale pattern of positively charged islands. Our approach provides guidelines for constructing nanoscale tracks to guide motor proteins underlying nano-engineered devices such as molecular shuttles

Deficiency of Capicua disrupts bile acid homeostasis

Capicua (CIC) has been implicated in pathogenesis of spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 and cancer in mammals; however, the in vivo physiological functions of CIC remain largely unknown. Here we show that Cic hypomorphic (Cic-L-/-) mice have impaired bile acid (BA) homeostasis associated with induction of proinflammatory cytokines. We discovered that several drug metabolism and BA transporter genes were down-regulated in Cic-L-/- liver, and that BA was increased in the liver and serum whereas bile was decreased within the gallbladder of Cic-L-/- mice. We also found that levels of proinflammatory cytokine genes were up-regulated in Cic-L-/- liver. Consistent with this finding, levels of hepatic transcriptional regulators, such as hepatic nuclear factor 1 alpha (HNF1 alpha), CCAAT/enhancer-binding protein beta (C/EBP beta), forkhead box protein A2 (FOXA2), and retinoid X receptor alpha (RXR alpha), were markedly decreased in Cic-L-/- mice. Moreover, induction of tumor necrosis factor alpha (Tnf alpha) expression and decrease in the levels of FOXA2, C/EBP beta, and RXRa were found in Cic-L-/- liver before BA was accumulated, suggesting that inflammation might be the cause for the cholestasis in Cic-L-/- mice. Our findings indicate that CIC is a critical regulator of BA homeostasis, and that its dysfunction might be associated with chronic liver disease and metabolic disorders.open11810Ysciescopu