Neurologists in the 19th century recognized that muscle weakness could be due to primary disorders of muscle or secondary to loss of neuromuscular integrity, as happens when peripheral nerves are cut or when motor neurons degenerate. Furthermore, it was observed that there are forms of motor neuron degeneration which selectively affect upper motor neurons or lower motor neurons. A combination o...

1 TITLE: 1 Contribution of motor neuron intrinsic properties to fictive motor pattern generation 2 3 Terrence M. Wright, Jr. and Ronald L. Calabrese 4 5 Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 6 7 8 9 10 RUNNING HEAD: 11 Motor Neuron Intrinsic Properties 12 13 Correspondence: 14 Terrence M. Wright 15 Department of Biology 16 Emory University 17 1510 Clifton Rd, NE 18 Atlanta,...

Hadjikoutis and Wiles draw attention to a number of circumstances in which the serum chloride and bicarbonate can be misleading. They do not mention that they will also be misleading if they are measured when hypercapnia is increasing or decreasing. An exacerbation of hypercapnia will take 4 – 6 days to raise the serum bicarbonate and lower the serum chloride to new steady levels. 1 How long it...

Motor neuron disease (MND) represents one ofthe major unsolved problems in neurology. The literature is characterized by numerous speculative theories, mostly derived by analogy with other recognized causes of motor neuron death such as poliomyelitis, or from toxic exposures such as lead poisoning. However, analogous reasoning of this type has not, so far, given insights into MND itself, or res...

OBJECTIVE To review evidences on the management of patients with motor neuron disease. DATA SOURCES PubMed literature searches from January 1982 up to January 2011. STUDY SELECTION Key words for literature search were "motor neuron disease review (MND)". Only the articles which concentrated on the ventilation, nutrition, cognitive or multidisciplinary approaches for motor neuron disease wer...

While motor neuron diseases are currently incurable, induced pluripotent stem cell research has uncovered some disease-relevant phenotypes. We will discuss strategies to model different aspects of motor neuron disease and the specific neurons involved in the disease. We will then describe recent progress to investigate common forms of motor neuron disease: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, heredit...

Background: The existing diagnostic criteria for definite, probable and possible amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) require at least one upper motor neuron (UMN) sign. However, we think some cases of ALS or motor neuron disease may be not able to fulfill the required criteria. We investigated whether the clinical presentation and course of patients with ALS or motor neuron disease fulfill the ...