People living with disability or chronic illness often use practices of care to construct a version of life they are satisfied with. Drawing from a narrative-based study with people living with motor neuron disease (MND), I show how one couple tried to be recognized as active agents in their life, although oscillating between positions of less and more power. Through an examination of the pract...

objective(s): parkinson's disease (pd) is a progressive neurological disorder associated with motor disabilities and cognitive dysfunction as well. evidence indicates that pd occurs less frequently in women than men, confirming a role for steroid hormones in protection of dopaminergic nigrostriatal neurons. it is reported that soy genistein, an estrogen agonist phytoestrogen, display neuro...

A case-control approach was used to study the relationship between parental age and motor neuron disease (MND) in a nationally representative sample of men. [The method, involving a search for parents' records in the NHS Central Register, is new and may be of interest in other conditions where parental age is thought to play a part.] The parents of men who died of MND in 1979 were not older tha...

Objective: To examine whether the distribution of prefrontal cortical thickness in patients with motor neuron disease is normal or bimodal and how it compares to the normal

Computational models of motor-unit populations are the objective implementations of the hypothesized mechanisms by which neural and muscle properties give rise to electromyograms (EMGs) and force. However, the variability/uncertainty of the parameters used in these models--and how they affect predictions--confounds assessing these hypothesized mechanisms. We perform a large-scale computational ...

Researchers are increasingly recognizing the usefulness of using joint interviews in research on illness experiences. However, there is limited discussion of joint interviews as a data collection method and of the factors that influence the choice to conduct individual or joint interviews. Although there are several advantages and disadvantages of both methods, the reasons that underpin the cho...

Twenty-seven of 42 patients with motor neuron disease had significant pain. The nature and duration of the pain are described along with an illustrative case-report. The aetiology and most effective treatment of this common complication of motor neuron disease remain unclear.

Agonist motor neurons usually alternate between activity and quiescence during normal rhythmic behavior; antagonist motor neurons are usually active during agonist motor neuron quiescence. During an antagonist deletion, a naturally occurring motor-pattern variation, there is no antagonist activity and no quiescence between successive bursts of agonist activity. Motor neuron recordings of normal...

Imposed movements of a proprioceptor that monitors the relative position of the tibia about the femur, the femorotibial chordotonal organ (FeCO), evoke resistance reflexes in the motor neurons that control the movements of the tibia of the locust. The response dynamics of one pool of motor neurons, the flexor tibiae motor neurons, which are located in three groups (anterior, lateral, and poster...