Christian Wertenbaker

Acquired Brown's Syndrome in Children with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis

Two children with systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis developed the features of Browns syndrome coincident with an increase in disease activity. While acquired Browns syndrome is known to occur in adults with both classical adult rheumatoid arthritis and persistent polyarticular juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, this is the first report of such an occurrence in childhood. The mechanism is likely to be an inflammatory mass which restricts the passage of the superior oblique tendon through the trochlea.

POST-OPERATIVE BILATERAL VISION LOSS

A 41-year-old man presented with acute bilateral loss of vision upon awakening after elective surgery. After thorough evaluation it was determined that he had suffered bilateral posterior ischemic optic neuropathies secondary to hypotension while under general anesthesia. One eye showed significant improvement over the next 4 weeks, whereas the other remained unchanged.

Unusual visual symptoms

Three cases with unusual and interesting symptomatology are presented. In each case the symptoms alone can lead the physician to an accurate localization of the lesion.

Opsoclonus — a cerebellar disorder?

The fifteenth autopsied case (the third due to presumed viral encephalitis) of opsoclonus is reported. While opsoclonus generally occurs only in a few specific clinical settings, the anatomical localization and degree of the pathological abnormalities are very variable. This may be because the responsible lesion is biochemically specific but anatomically diffuse and thus, to a variable extent, eludes standard neuropathological techniques.

Delayed ophthalmoplegia following head trauma

Abstract An eleven-year-old boy presented to the emergency room following frontal head trauma with injury to the right optic nerve. Two weeks later he developed progressive right ophthalmoplegia. The patients ophthalmoplegia resolved following an operation. The differential diagnosis of this entity is discussed in detail.

Unilateral straight hair and congenital horner syndrome.

Congenital Horner syndrome is a rare disorder that accounts for less than 5% of all cases of Horner syndrome. Like Horner syndrome in general, it consists primarily of ptosis, miosis, and anhidrosis. Congenital Horner syndrome may manifest some special features such as iris heterochromia since the sympathetic nervous system is an essential component for the development and maintenance of eye color. We present 3 cases of unilateral straight hair in association with congenital Horner syndrome in which the patients had straight hair ipsilateral to the Horner syndrome, whereas on the contralateral side, it was curly, and we discuss possible mechanisms for this phenomenon.

Modification of Contact Placing by Aversive Conditioning

Contact placing (CP) in cats is oftenrapidly inhibited if a container filled with water is substituted for the solid surface on which the paw usually lands. Resting the paw on the solid for a few seco

Report of a Conference on the Anuran Visual System

In the interest of promoting interaction among the laboratories of the world which have directed attention to the visually guided behavior of frogs and toads, a Workshop was held at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn from August 22 to 24, 1972. The gathering was sponsored by the Graduate Program in Biological Psychology at Downstate and supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The program was constituted of a series of in-depth discussions on visually guided behavior, visuomotor pathways, visuomotor physiology and the develop-ment of Visual connections. The objective was to focus on visually guided behavior in relation to its mechanisms.

The Neural Circuitry Subserving Aversive Conditioning of Contact Placing in Cats

Before considering aversive conditioning of contact placing (CP), it is useful to review the circuitry subserving this behavior. Previous studies from our laboratory utilizing lesions, cold blocks, and recordings from individual somatosensory and motor control neurons led to the proposal that CP in the adult cat is dynamically subserved by at least two major thalamocortical projection systems, the ventralis posterior to sensorimotor cortex and the cerebellum to ventralis lateralis and anterior to motor cortex (Amassian et al., 1972a,b). More recently, the rubral projection system was shown also to contribute dynamically to CP (Batson and Amassian, 1986), the major contributing input deriving from the deep cerebellar nuclei (Amassian and Batson, 1983). In the neonatal kitten, the sensorimotor cortex initially does not contribute to CP, but during the second week, the pyramidal tract (PT) begins contributing tonically to CP, the adult pattern of control of CP subsequently emerging after 6–7 weeks (Amassian and Ross, 1978). The claim that full hindlimb placing can be elicited in the spinal kitten (Forssberg et al., 1974) has been refuted in several laboratories (Amassian et al., 1977; Bradley et al., 1983; Bregman and Goldberger, 1982), the lower brainstem being essential, especially the vestibular complex (Amassian et al., 1977).

Comparative Material on Visual Evoked Potential Equipment

The following pages are designed to provide information to the potential buyer of visual evoked response equipment, which will allow him to preliminarily select the system(s) that might best serve his needs. The data presented here are necessarily incomplete, and the potential buyer should obviously follow-up on possible choices by writing for the company brochures, and then conducting discussions with company representatives and with users of the equipment. Ideally, he should see the equipment in operation. Some of the features and quirks of equipment of this complexity cannot be conveyed in lists of specifications, even the most complete, and neither the following descriptions nor the company brochures are complete. Also, the choice of equipment may depend to a great extent on its capabilities other than visualevoked response testing (ERG, EOG, AER, SER, EMG, EEG analysis, general computing), and these are listed but not elaborated on in the following descriptions. We have not listed every manufacturer of equipment that can be used to record VERso One can build such a system in many ways, even starting from the most basic components. Building ones own system provides the optimum system for the users needs but takes a great deal of time and knowledge. It is obviously impractical to list every computer, amplifier, averager, or oscilloscope that could be used; therefore, we have restricted these pages to more or less complete systems for VER testing (although they may have other uses as well). Even in this respect, the list is incomplete. * We have found the listed systems by using personal knowledge, discussions with a few colleagues, and perusing the advertising pages of journals. Some of the companies did not reply to our re-