Neurological disorders associated with glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) antibodies include stiff-person syndrome (SPS) and its variants — stiff trunk syndrome, stiff limbs syndrome, progressive encephalomyelitis with rigidity, SPS-plus and paraneoplastic SPS — as well as epilepsy and ataxia1-8. These syndromes are often found in association with other autoimmune disorders, such as diabetes mel...

Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS) is a rare autoimmune neurological disease attributable to autoantibodies to glutamic acid decarboxylase (anti-GAD) more usually associated with the islet beta cell destruction of autoimmune type 1 diabetes (T1D). SPS is characterized by interference in neurons with the synthesis/activity of the inhibitory neurotransmitter gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) resulting in ...

Molecular methods are increasingly used to identify microbes in clinical samples. A common technical problem with PCR is failed amplification due to the presence of PCR inhibitors. Initial attempts at amplification of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene from inoculated blood culture media failed for this reason. The inhibitor persisted, despite numerous attempts to purify the DNA, and was identified as...

BACKGROUND The Shingles Prevention Study (SPS) demonstrated zoster vaccine efficacy through 4 years postvaccination. A Short-Term Persistence Substudy (STPS) demonstrated persistence of vaccine efficacy for at least 5 years. A Long-Term Persistence Substudy (LTPS) was undertaken to further assess vaccine efficacy in SPS vaccine recipients followed for up to 11 years postvaccination. Study outco...

Strategies for treating Alzheimer's disease (AD) include therapies designed to decrease senile plaque (SP) formation and/or promote clearance of SPs, but clinical trials of these treatments are limited by the lack of effective methods to monitor changes in plaque burden in the brains of living AD patients. However, because SPs are extracellular deposits of amyloid-beta peptides (Abeta), it may ...

The aim of the present study, was to investigate the involvement of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by detecting changes of ER chaperone protein 78 and ER-resident caspase 12 in the basolateral amygdala after exposure to single prolonged stress (SPS). The established rat model of PTSD was generated by exposure of the animals to SPS. The expression of gluc...

Stiff person syndrome (SPS) is a rare, chronic disorder characterized by painful spasm and stiffness. We investigated the quality of life (QoL) in SPS patients, and identified factors associated with impairment in patients' QoL. Twenty-four SPS patients (10 men, 14 women; mean age +/- S.D., 52.6 +/- 9.5 years) completed the medical outcomes study Short Form health survey (SF-36), the Beck Depre...

This licentiate thesis concerns mathematical modeling and identification of the the human smooth pursuit system (SPS) and the application of the models to motor symptom quantification in Parkinson’s disease (PD). The SPS is a complex neuromuscular system governing smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM), and the task is to keep a moving target in the visual field. Diagnosing and quantifying the dis...

IMPORTANCE Stiff person syndrome (SPS) is a rare neurological disease causing significant functional disability for patients and presenting a therapeutic challenge for clinicians. Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (auto-HSCT) has been used successfully to remit autoimmune-mediated neurological diseases. We report 2 cases of severe SPS treated with auto-HSCT, a novel therapy for...

The function and activity of almost every circuit in the human brain are modified by the signaling peptides (SPs) surrounding the neurons. As the complement of peptides can vary even in adjacent neurons and their physiological actions can occur over a broad range of concentrations, the required figures of merit for techniques to characterize SPs are surprisingly stringent. In this review, we de...