Diurnal and nocturnal drooling in Parkinson’s disease

Drooling as symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD) has thus far been poorly defined. This uncertainty is reflected by high variations in published prevalence rates. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of saliva loss versus accumulation of saliva as a possible preliminary stage, and diurnal drooling versus nocturnal drooling. In addition, we evaluated the association between drooling severity and the severity of facial and oral motor disorders. We collected age, disease duration, UPDRS III and Hoehn & Yahr stage from 104 consecutive outpatients with PD. Diurnal and nocturnal drooling was evaluated with a validated questionnaire (ROMP-saliva). A speech pathologist, blinded for drooling severity, rated facial expression, involuntary mouth opening and difficulty with nose breathing and also interviewed patients about sleeping position and nose-breathing during the night. Thirty patients (29%) had no complaints with saliva control (‘non-droolers’), 45 patients (43%) experienced accumulation of saliva or only nocturnal drooling (‘pre-droolers’), and 29 (28%) had diurnal drooling (24 of which also drooled during the night; ‘droolers’). The droolers had longer disease duration (10 vs. 7 years, p = 0.01) and drooling was independently associated with involuntary mouth opening (OR = 2.0; 95% CI 1.02–3.99) and swallowing complaints (OR = 1.2; 95% CI 1.03–1.31). Diurnal drooling—defined as dribbling of saliva while awake—is present in about 28% of PD patients. This is less than usually reported. Diurnal drooling typically appeared later in the disease course. The association with oral motor behavior should encourage the development of behavioral treatment approaches

Chronic, low-dose rotenone reproduces Lewy neurites found in early stages of Parkinson's disease, reduces mitochondrial movement and slowly kills differentiated SH-SY5Y neural cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Parkinson's disease, the most common adult neurodegenerative movement disorder, demonstrates a brain-wide pathology that begins pre-clinically with alpha-synuclein aggregates ("Lewy neurites") in processes of gut enteric and vagal motor neurons. Rostral progression into substantia nigra with death of dopamine neurons produces the motor impairment phenotype that yields a clinical diagnosis. The vast majority of Parkinson's disease occurs sporadically, and current models of sporadic Parkinson's disease (sPD) can utilize directly infused or systemic neurotoxins.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed a differentiation protocol for human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma that yielded non-dividing dopaminergic neural cells with long processes that we then exposed to 50 nM rotenone, a complex I inhibitor used in Parkinson's disease models. After 21 days of rotenone, ~60% of cells died. Their processes retracted and accumulated ASYN-(+) and UB-(+) aggregates that blocked organelle transport. Mitochondrial movement velocities were reduced by 8 days of rotenone and continued to decline over time. No cytoplasmic inclusions resembling Lewy bodies were observed. Gene microarray analyses showed that the majority of genes were under-expressed. qPCR analyses of 11 mtDNA-encoded and 10 nDNA-encoded mitochondrial electron transport chain RNAs' relative expressions revealed small increases in mtDNA-encoded genes and lesser regulation of nDNA-encoded ETC genes.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Subacute rotenone treatment of differentiated SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells causes process retraction and partial death over several weeks, slowed mitochondrial movement in processes and appears to reproduce the Lewy neuritic changes of early Parkinson's disease pathology but does not cause Lewy body inclusions. The overall pattern of transcriptional regulation is gene under-expression with minimal regulation of ETC genes in spite of rotenone's being a complex I toxin. This rotenone-SH-SY5Y model in a differentiated human neural cell mimics changes of early Parkinson's disease and may be useful for screening therapeutics for neuroprotection in that disease stage.</p

Mortality, Recruitment and Change of Desert Tree Populations in a Hyper-Arid Environment

BACKGROUND: Long-term vegetation changes in hyper-arid areas have long been neglected. Mortality, recruitment and change in populations of the ecologically and culturally important and drought persistent Acacia tortilis and Balanites aegyptiaca are therefore estimated in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and are related to the primary agents of change, water conditions and human intervention. METHODOLOGY: A change analysis using high-resolution Corona images (1965) in combination with field data (2003) is the basis for recruitment, mortality and change estimates. For assessing the influence of water conditions on patterns in recruitment and survival, different types of generalized linear models are tested. CONCLUSIONS: The overall trend in population size in that part of the Eastern Desert studied here is negative. At some sites this negative trend is alarming, because the reduction in mature trees is substantial (>50%) at the same time as recruitment is nearly absent. At a few sites there is a positive trend and better recruitment. Frequent observations of sprouting in saplings indicate that this is an important mechanism to increase their persistence. It is the establishment itself that seems to be the main challenge in the recruitment process. There are indications that hydrological variables and surface water in particular can explain some of the observed pattern in mortality, but our results indicate that direct human intervention, i.e., charcoal production, is the main cause of tree mortality in the Eastern Desert

Identification of two novel powdery mildew resistance loci, Ren6 and Ren7, from the wild Chinese grape species Vitis piasezkii

Descriptive statistics of the phenotypic scores within the base mapping population 11-373. Powdery mildew symptoms in the field were evaluated in two subsequent years. Greenhouse, in vitro experiments and the qPCR-based molecular assay were carried out with three to four biological replicates of each seedling plant in 2014. (DOCX 14ย�kb

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe