Neurological Disorders

Introduction and aims: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Large registry studies have demonstrated a dose response relationship between TBI and neurodegenerative disease; however, disentangling the direct effects of TBI from ageing and/or a progressive neurodegenerative process is problematic. This study is a prospective long term cohort study to examine a population of retired elite athletes at high risk of concussion and mTBI during their sporting careers compared to age and sex matched controls with no history of TBI. The aim is to determine the incidence and risk factors for neurodegenerative disease and/or age related effects on brain health in this population.

Methods and analysis: A population of retired male and female elite athletes and controls aged 40-85 years, will be assessed at baseline and serial time points over 10 years during life using a multi-dimensional assessment including: Questionnaire; SCAT3/5; Neurological and physical examination; Instrumented balance assessment; Computerised neurocognitive screen; Neuropsychological assessment; Advanced MR brain neuroimaging; Visual saccades; Blood workup; Fluid biomarkers; Gut metabolomics; Salivary MicroRNA analysis; Genetic analysis; and where available Brain banking and neuropathology.

Ethics and dissemination: Ethics approval was granted by St Mary’s University SMEC as well as at the various satellite trial sites. The trial is registered with ISRCTN (BioMed Central) with ID number: 11312093. In addition to the usual dissemination process, this phenotypically well characterised dataset will reside in a publicly accessible infrastructure of integrated databases, imaging repositories, and biosample repositories and de‐identified data will be made available to collaborating researchers.

Fear is a common emotional reaction to an impending threat like the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus. A fear of COVID-19 Scale has been developed to evaluate the severity of COVID-19 related fear. This study investigated the psychometric characteristics a Syrian Arabic version of the scale to give additional validation for the Arabic FCV-19S using an online survey of 1637 Syrian individuals. The results were compared with their responses to the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale and the Satisfaction with Life scale. Cronbach’s alpha for the Syrian version of the fear of COVID-19 scale was determined to 0.84.

The scale’s ratings showed a significant negative relationship with life satisfaction and a significant positive association with sub-scales of the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale.

Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the Syrian version of the fear of COVID-19 Scale has a unidimensional structure which fits the data well. The scale has useful psychometric characteristics and can be employed to evaluate the severity of fear of COVID-19 among Syrian populations.

The treatment of cognitive impairments in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) poses a challenge on the therapy of the disorder. The current study examines the effects of a computer based cognitive training in patients with PD. 13 individuals with PD (3 females, 10 males) and 16 healthy controls (8 females, 8 males) participated in the study. They underwent a 6 week cognitive rehabilitation program, focusing on attention, working memory, and executive functions. We measured (i) pre and post-training cognitive performance with standard neuropsychological tests and (ii) improvement in the training tasks across the intervention. In both groups, performance improved significantly within all training modules (p<.001). A significant increase of performance was evident from pre to post-intervention untrained neuropsychological measures of working memory (p<.001). Moreover, correlational analyses showed that enhancement in each trained task was accompanied by improvement in the same cognitive domain in untrained neuropsychological tests. To our knowledge this study is the first providing evidence for a transfer of cognitive improvement in trained tasks to untrained neuropsychological measures in patients with PD. We propose that patients with PD will benefit from the inclusion of cognitive training in medical treatment of the disorder.

Objectives: A retrospective analysis study of 40 patients, with cervical, and/or lumbar disc prolapse, to evaluate the effectiveness of long term conservative treatment.

Method: The study involved 40 patients with acute or chronic onset of cervical or lumbar radiculopathy, due to disc prolapse between 2015 and 2019. All the data were obtained from the database in our institution. All patients had a standard neurological and clinical assessment, with follow up Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for a period ranging from 2 to 3 years. The Associations between clinical findings during the physical examination and follow up MRI imaging findings were compared and discussed. All patients were refusing surgery because of the surgical drew back occurring to their family members, medical problems preventing surgery, or they had improvement with long term conservative therapy. The protocol of medical treatment and physiotherapy were the same for all patients.

Results: Long term conservative treatment for cervical and lumbar disc prolapses could be superior and better than surgical treatment in acute disc prolapse without any neurological deterioration. The surgical treatment of the cervical and lumbar disc prolapses in young patients has not been considered the gold slandered option of treatment because of the postoperative complications especially recurrence disc and the failed back surgery syndrome.

Conclusion: The conservative treatment of cervical and/or lumbar disc prolapses of all patients was effective for long term therapy. The follow up MRI spine shows spontaneous regression of the disc materials. Therefore, conservative management of disc prolapses could be better than surgical management especially, in acute stages.

Background: Given the severity of the brain death burden and its main cause in emergency clinical settings, intracerebral hemorrhage due to concussion, determining the most common type of hemorrhage among these patients, helps us to predict the likelihood of progression of the vegetative outcome.

Purpose: This study aimed to assess the prevalence of different types of intracranial hemorrhage in patients with brain death.

Material and methods: 70 head traumatic brain dead patients who were referred to Masih Daneshvari hospital undergone assessment by CT scan to determine the prevalence of major intracranial hemorrhage types and their complications.

Results: Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SDH) are the most common types of intracranial hemorrhage among patients with brain death. Overall, 45.7% and 40%, respectively, were associated with bleeding events with a change in the midline at 14.3% and edema at 12.9%. The middle shift was more common in SAH patients, while edema was more common in SDH patients. Each relative to the other.

Conclusion: This study showed that SAH and SDH are the most common types of intracranial hemorrhage in patients with traumatic brain injury.