Charles J. Ippolito, MD

AIDS Dementia: Current Status and New Treatment Approaches

The clinical diagnosis of Pick disease can be one of the most difficult facing the neurologist. Those patients found to have lobar atrophy usually present clinically with bouts of irrational behavior, bulimia, marked reductions in speech, abulia, and apathy.

Civilian cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI) account for more than 50,000 deaths annually and represent about 50% of deaths attributed to physical injury. These injuries are a significant medical and socioeconomic burden and represent one of the leading public health problems in the United States. However, thanks to injury prevention and changes in hospital admission practices, a decline of almost 50% in civilian hospitalizations for TBI has been observed since 1980, with many patients now treated on an outpatient basis.

Neuroblastoma (NB) is the most common pediatric, intra-abdominal, extracranial, solid tumor derived from nervous tissue. This malignant neoplasm occurs at an annual rate of 9.1 cases per 1 million American children younger than 15 years and is found more frequently in boys. The median age at diagnosis is 2 years for both sexes, with most cases being diagnosed by the age of 5 years. Metastatic disease is often found at presentation and represents about 70% of all newly diagnosed cases.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is one of the most common brain tumors and is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality.1 Primary tumors of the brain occur in about 16,000 persons and account for around 13,000 deaths annually (a mortality rate of 6 per 100,000) in the United States.

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the leading cause of postneonatal death in the United States.1 This unfortunate disorder is characterized by the sudden, unexpected death of an of infant between ages 1 and 12 months whose cause of death remains a mystery in the aftermath of a thorough postmortem examination that includes an autopsy, an investigation of the death scene, and a careful review of the infant's medical history. New research, published in the November 2006 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association,2 that made recent headlines confirmed earlier research by the same investigative team3,4 showing that serotonergic brain stem abnormalities may be the at the root of SIDS.

Characterized by a triad of symptoms including inflammation, demyelination, and gliosis, multiple sclerosis (MS) affects approximately 1.1 million persons worldwide.1 The disorder is accompanied by neurologic symptoms that include disturbances of sensation, coordination, and vision along with changes in sexual function, bladder and bowel function, gait, and endurance.

President George W. Bush's recent veto of the bill to expand federal support for embryonic stem cell research will probably not have any long-term devastating effects on the future treatment of Parkinson disease (PD) or Alzheimer disease (AD).

An unfavorable prognosis may be in store for patients who report severely disrupted sleep patterns accompanied by rapid eye movement (REM).

DBS Provides a New Lease on Life