Search results for "Weak"
showing 10 items of 1417 documents
The final word on nutritional screening and assessment in older persons
2017
Purpose of review: To provide an updated perspective of how nutritional screening and assessment in older persons should be performed and reasonably implemented in the near future. Recent findings: Although nutritional screening and assessment should be fast and easy procedures, there is increasing evidence that more time should be dedicated to them. This is probably an answer to the claim to a medicine being more preventive than curative. Increasing interest is currently given to healthy aging and nutritional status is more likely to be addressed for its implications on functional status and disability. Important prognostic conditions, such as frailty, sarcopenia, and cachexia, which are c…
Frailty Quantified by the "Valencia Score" as a Potential Predictor of Lifespan in Mice.
2017
The development of frailty scores suitable for mice and which resemble those used in the clinical scenario is of great importance to understand human frailty. The aim of the study was to determine an individual frailty score for each mouse at different ages and analyze the association between the frailty score and its lifespan. For this purpose, the "Valencia Score" for frailty was used. Thus, a longitudinal study in mice was performed analyzing weight loss, running time and speed, grip strength and motor coordination at the late-adult, mature and old ages (40, 56 and 80 weeks old, respectively). These parameters are equivalent to unintentional weight loss, poor endurance, slowness, weaknes…
A New Frailty Score for Experimental Animals Based on the Clinical Phenotype: Inactivity as a Model of Frailty.
2016
The development of animal models to study human frailty is important to test interventions to be translated to the clinical practice. The aim of this work was to develop a score for frailty in experimental animals based in the human frailty phenotype. We also tested the effect of physical inactivity in the development of frailty as determined by our score. Male C57Bl/6J mice, individually caged, were randomly assigned to one of two groups: sedentary (inactive) or spontaneous wheel-runners. We compared the sedentary versus the active lifestyle in terms of frailty by evaluating the clinical criteria used in humans: unintentional weight loss; poor endurance (running time); slowness (running sp…
Skeletal muscle-specific methyltransferase METTL21C trimethylates p97 and regulates autophagy-associated protein breakdown
2018
Summary: Protein aggregates and cytoplasmic vacuolization are major hallmarks of multisystem proteinopathies (MSPs) that lead to muscle weakness. Here, we identify METTL21C as a skeletal muscle-specific lysine methyltransferase. Insertion of a β-galactosidase cassette into the Mettl21c mouse locus revealed that METTL21C is specifically expressed in MYH7-positive skeletal muscle fibers. Ablation of the Mettl21c gene reduced endurance capacity and led to age-dependent accumulation of autophagic vacuoles in skeletal muscle. Denervation-induced muscle atrophy highlighted further impairments of autophagy-related proteins, including LC3, p62, and cathepsins, in Mettl21c−/− muscles. In addition, w…
Acute onset of bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis after flu – look at the differential diagnosis: A case report
2018
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting upper and lower motor neurones. It can be either familial (fALS) or sporadic (sALS). ALS is characterized by muscle weakness and atrophy that can involve the limbs and trunk (i.e. the spinal form of the disease) or speech and swallowing (i.e. the bulbar form). The aetiology of sALS remains unclear although a gene–environment interaction has been proposed as a concomitant trigger for the neurodegenerative process together with viral infections, smoking, heavy metals and pesticide exposure. Herein, we report the case of a 67-year-old woman who experienced an acute onset of bulbar ALS with an atypical clinical cours…
Clinical Correlates of Functional Motor Disorders: An Italian Multicenter Study
2020
Background\ud Functional motor disorders (FMDs) are abnormal movements that are significantly altered by distractive maneuvers and are incongruent with movement disorders seen in typical neurological diseases.\ud \ud Objective\ud The objectives of this article are to (1) describe the clinical manifestations of FMDs, including nonmotor symptoms and occurrence of other functional neurological disorders (FND); and (2) to report the frequency of isolated and combined FMDs and their relationship with demographic and clinical variables.\ud \ud Methods\ud For this multicenter, observational study, we enrolled consecutive outpatients with a definite diagnosis of FMDs attending 25 tertiary movement …
CNS-Targeting Therapies for Lysosomal Storage Diseases: Current Advances and Challenges.
2020
During the past decades, several therapeutic approaches have been developed and made rapidly available for many patients afflicted with lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs), inborn organelle disorders with broad clinical manifestations secondary to the progressive accumulation of undegraded macromolecules within lysosomes. These conditions are individually rare, but, collectively, their incidence ranges from 1 in 2,315 to 7,700 live-births. Most LSDs are manifested by neurological symptoms or signs, including developmental delay, seizures, acroparesthesia, motor weakness, and extrapyramidal signs. The chronic and later-onset clinical forms are at one end of the continuum spectrum and are char…
Age and muscle function are more closely associated with intracellular magnesium, as assessed by 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy, than with serum…
2019
Total serum magnesium is a common clinical measurement for assessing magnesium status; however, magnesium in blood represents less than 1% of the body’s total magnesium content. We measured intramuscular ionized magnesium by phosphorus magnetic resonance spectroscopy (31P-MRS) and tested the hypothesis that this measure better correlates with skeletal muscle function and captures more closely the effect of aging than the traditional measure of total serum magnesium. Data were collected from 441 participants (age 24–98 years) in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), a study of normative aging that encompasses a broad age range. Results showed that intramuscular ionized magnesium …
Therapeutic Potential of AntagomiR-23b for Treating Myotonic Dystrophy
2020
Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is a chronically debilitating, rare genetic disease that originates from an expansion of a noncoding CTG repeat in the dystrophia myotonica protein kinase (DMPK) gene. The expansion becomes pathogenic when DMPK transcripts contain 50 or more repetitions due to the sequestration of the muscleblind-like (MBNL) family of proteins. Depletion of MBNLs causes alterations in splicing patterns in transcripts that contribute to clinical symptoms such as myotonia and muscle weakness and wasting. We previously found that microRNA (miR)-23b directly regulates MBNL1 in DM1 myoblasts and mice and that antisense technology (“antagomiRs”) blocking this microRNA (miRNA) boost…
Giant cell arteritis (Horton's disease) in very elderly patients aged 80 years and older: A study of 25 cases
2015
Aim Analysis of the characteristics of very elderly patients with giant cell arteritis (GCA). Methods Patients aged 80 years and older diagnosed with GCA in our department between 1 January 2002 and 31 July 2008 were retrospectively included. For each patient, we recorded general characteristics, reason(s) for hospitalization, specialty of the physician or department that referred the patient to us, medical history, treatment at admission, GCA clinical features, time to diagnosis of GCA, biological screening and GCA treatment. Results We analyzed 25 clinical records, 18 women and seven men with a mean age of 83.9 years. General weakness, visual loss and inflammatory syndrome were the princi…