Search results for " neurosurgery"

Fluorescein for resection of high-grade gliomas: A safety study control in a single center and review of the literature

2017

Background: The importance of a complete resection of high-grade gliomas (HGGs) has been highlighted in scientific literature, in order to limit tumor recurrence and above all to improve disease-free survival rates. Several fluorescent biomarkers have been tested to improve intraoperative identification of residual tumor; 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) and fluorescein sodium (FS) are now starting to play a central role in glioma surgery. We performed a retrospective analysis on 47 patients operated for HGGs. Here we report our preliminary data. Methods: Data of 47 consecutive patients with HGG have been collected in our study (25 males, 22 females; mean age: 60.3 years, range: 27-86 years). …

A Rare Case of Giant Basal Cell Carcinoma of the Abdominal Wall: Excision and Immediate Reconstruction with a Pedicled Deep Inferior Epigastric Arter…

2017

Patient: Female, 82 Final Diagnosis: Giant basal cell carcinoma Symptoms: Anemia Medication: — Clinical Procedure: — Specialty: Plastic Surgery Objective: Rare disease Background: Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) greater than 5 cm in diameter is called giant basal cell carcinoma (GBCC), or super giant basal cell carcinoma if it has a diameter larger than 20 cm. Giant BCC only accounts for 0.5% of BCCs and super giant BCC is exceedingly rare. On account of their rarity, there are no established guidelines for GBCC treatment. Case Report: We describe a peculiar case of an 82-year-old woman with a GBCC carcinoma of the lower abdominal wall. The tumor was surgically removed with ipsilateral inguinal …

Impact of Nonstationarities on Short Heart Rate Variability Recordings During Obstructive Sleep Apnea

2017

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder characterized by breathing pauses due to collapse of the upper airways. During OSA the autonomic modulation, as noninvasively assessed through heart period (HP) variability, is altered in a time-varying way even though time-varying properties of HP fluctuations are often disregarded by HP variability studies. We performed a time domain analysis computed over very short epochs corresponding to the sole OSA events explicitly accounting for HP variability nonstationarities. Length-matched epochs were extracted during OSA and quiet sleep (SLEEP) in 13 subjects suffering from OSA (11 males, age 55±11, apnea-hypopnea index 44±19). Mean HP, varianc…

A survey on sleep questionnaires and diaries.

2017

[EN] Sleep assessment is a fundamental part of health evaluation. In fact, many diseases (such as obesity, diabetes, or hypertension, as well as psychiatric, neurological, and cardiovascular diseases) produce sleep disorders that are often used as indicators, diagnosis (symptoms), or even as predictors (eg, for depression) of health. For this reason, many efforts have been devoted to designing methods to control and report on sleep quality. Two of the most used sleep assessment tools are sleep questionnaires and sleep diaries. Both methods have a very low cost are easy to administer do not require a sleep centre (unlike, eg, polysomnography), and can be self-administered. Most important, as…

Primary intra and extradural solitary fibrous tumor/hemangiopericytoma of thoracic spine with paravertebral intrathoracic spread: Case report and rev…

2020

Abstract Solitary fibrous tumors/hemangiopericytomas (SFTs/HPCs), constitute 1% of all CNS tumors. Spinal SFTs/HPCs are extremely rare. To date, few retrospective studies and case reports of primary spinal SFTs/HPCs have been published in the literature. We report clinical and radiological presentation, surgical treatment, and post-operative outcome at three years follow-up of a rare case of primary spinal intra and extradural SFT/HPC of thoracic spine with dumbbell shaped paravertebral intrathoracic spread and multidirectional erosion of the bone. A 73-year-old female presented with progressive lower limbs weakness and hypoesthesia below the rib cage. MRI showed an irregular isointense T5-…

2018

The pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) is engaged in speech comprehension under difficult circumstances such as poor acoustic signal quality or time-critical conditions. Previous studies found that left pre-SMA is activated when subjects listen to accelerated speech. Here, the functional role of pre-SMA was tested for accelerated speech comprehension by inducing a transient "virtual lesion" using continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS). Participants were tested (1) prior to (pre-baseline), (2) 10 min after (test condition for the cTBS effect), and (3) 60 min after stimulation (post-baseline) using a sentence repetition task (formant-synthesized at rates of 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 syllab…

Brain event-related potentials to phoneme contrasts and their correlation to reading skills in school-age children

2017

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the speech processing mechanisms for common and uncommon sound contrasts (/ba/-/da/-/ga/ and /ata/-/at: a/) with respect to the native language of school-age children in Finland and the US. In addition, a comprehensive behavioral test battery of reading and phonological processing was administered. ERPs revealed that the children could discriminate betw…

Music Training Enhances Rapid Neural Plasticity of N1 and P2 Source Activation for Unattended Sounds

2012

Neurocognitive studies have demonstrated that long-term music training enhances the processing of unattended sounds. It is not clear, however, whether music training also modulates rapid (within tens of minutes) neural plasticity for sound encoding. To study this phenomenon, we examined whether adult musicians display enhanced rapid neural plasticity compared to non-musicians. More specifically, we compared the modulation of P1, N1, and P2 responses to standard sounds between four unattended passive blocks. Among the standard sounds, infrequently presented deviant sounds were presented (the so-called oddball paradigm). In the middle of the experiment (after two blocks), an active task was p…

Mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by changes in phoneme length: A cross-linguistic study

2006

Speech sounds representing different phonetic categories are typically easier to discriminate than sounds belonging to the same category. This phenomenon is referred to as the phoneme boundary effect. We aimed to determine whether, at neural level, this effect is indeed due to crossing the phoneme boundary. The mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response was measured for across- and within-category changes in Finnish phoneme length in native speakers and second-language users of Finnish as well as non-Finnish-speaking subjects. The results showed that the MMN amplitude was enhanced in the native speakers in comparison with the two non-native groups which, in turn, did not differ from each othe…

Spontaneous anterior cervicothoracic spinal epidural hematoma extending to clivus in SARS-CoV-2 infection

2021

Background: The treatment of spontaneous spinal epidural hematomas (SSEHs), depending on the lesion size and myeloradicular involvement, can be surgical or conservative. Here, we present a 55-year-old patient who sustained a SSEH several months following a systemic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Case Description: A 55-year-old immunocompromised female (i.e., history 17 years ago of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, nodular sclerosis variant) recently developed a SARS-CoV-2 infection treated with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents. She then reported the sudden onset of cervicodorsalgia after a slight cervical flexion/extension maneuver. The brain and cervicothoracic spine MRI studies documented a clival anteri…