We reviewed the clinical and laboratory oculomotor features in 30 patients with probable multiple system atrophy (MSA), 22 with MSA-P and 8 with MSA-C. Six patients were also examined post mortem, MSA being confirmed in four and excluded in two (Parkinson's disease and progressive supranuclear palsy). Clinical examination showed the following abnormalities; excessive square wave jerks--21 of 30...

BACKGROUND The profile and degree of cognitive impairment in Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) and the impact of sleep disorders, REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) in particular, in parkinsonism-related cognitive deficits are currently being debated. SUMMARY We reviewed the cognitive, affective and sleep findings in MSA and also carried out a longitudinal investigation of 10 MSA patients. At the ...

Background. Differentiating Parkinson's disease (PD) from multiple system atrophy (MSA) can be challenging especially early in the course of the disease. Previous studies have shown that midbrain serotonin transporter (SERT) availability in patients with established MSA was significantly lower compared to PD. It is unknown if this is also true for early-stage patients. Methods. 77 early-stage, ...

We introduce a new approach to learning statistical models from multiple sequence alignments (MSA) of proteins. Our method, called GREMLIN (Generative REgularized ModeLs of proteINs), learns an undirected probabilistic graphical model of the amino acid composition within the MSA. The resulting model encodes both the position-specific conservation statistics and the correlated mutation statistic...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the incidence, types, determinants, and consequences of sleep disorders in patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA) and determine whether their characteristics are similar to those of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). METHODS Information about sleep disorders was collected using a standardised questionnaire in an unselected group of 57 patients with MSA and in ...

Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a rare neurodegenerative disorder associated with parkinsonism, ataxia, and autonomic dysfunction. Its pathology is primarily subcortical comprising vacuolation, neuronal loss, gliosis, and α-synucleinimmunoreactive glial cytoplasmic inclusions (GCI). To quantify cerebellar pathology in MSA, the density and spatial pattern of the pathological changes were studie...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Neuropathological studies have demonstrated that multiple system atrophy (MSA) produces selective atrophy of the putamen with sparing of the caudate nucleus, while both structures are spared in idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD). In this study we evaluated the clinical efficacy of using putaminal atrophy in brain MRI to differentiate MSA and PD. METHODS We measured the...

Our previous report showed that methylseleninic acid (MSA) significantly decreases the expression of androgen receptor and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in LNCaP cells. The present study extended the above observations by showing the universality of this phenomenon and that the inhibitory effect of MSA on prostate cancer cell growth and cancer-specific biomarkers is mediated through androgen ...

In the neurodegenerative disease multiple system atrophy (MSA), α-synuclein misfolds into a self-templating conformation to become a prion. To compare the biological activity of α-synuclein prions in MSA and Parkinson's disease (PD), we developed nine α-synuclein-YFP cell lines expressing point mutations responsible for inherited PD. MSA prions robustly infected wild-type, A30P, and A53T α-synu...

The MSA program, written and distributed in 1989, is one of the few existing programs that attempts to find optimal alignments of multiple protein or DNA sequences. The MSA program implements a branch-and-bound technique together with a variant of Dijkstra's shortest paths algorithm to prune the basic dynamic programming graph. We have made substantial improvements in the time and space usage o...