Pierpaolo Sorrentino

The dark sides of amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis

Although widely explored, the pathogenesis of Alzheimers disease (AD) has yet to be cleared. Over the past twenty years the so call amyloid cascade hypothesis represented the main research paradigm in AD pathogenesis. In spite of its large consensus, the proposed role of β‐amyloid (Aβ) remain to be elucidated. Many evidences are starting to cast doubt on Aβ as the primary causative factor in AD. For instance, Aβ is deposited in the brain following many different kinds of injury. Also, concentration of Aβ needed to induce toxicity in vitro are never reached in vivo. In this review we propose an amyloid‐independent interpretation of several AD pathogenic features, such as synaptic plasticity, endo‐lysosomal trafficking, cell cycle regulation and neuronal survival.

Type and Location of Wearable Sensors for Monitoring Falls during Static and Dynamic Tasks in Healthy Elderly: A Review

In recent years, the meaning of successful living has moved from extending lifetime to improving the quality of aging, mainly in terms of high cognitive and physical functioning together with avoiding diseases. In healthy elderly, falls represent an alarming accident both in terms of number of events and the consequent decrease in the quality of life. Stability control is a key approach for studying the genesis of falls, for detecting the event and trying to develop methodologies to prevent it. Wearable sensors have proved to be very useful in monitoring and analyzing the stability of subjects. Within this manuscript, a review of the approaches proposed in the literature for fall risk assessment, fall prevention and fall detection in healthy elderly is provided. The review has been carried out by using the most adopted publication databases and by defining a search strategy based on keywords and boolean algebra constructs. The analysis aims at evaluating the state of the art of such kind of monitoring, both in terms of most adopted sensor technologies and of their location on the human body. The review has been extended to both dynamic and static analyses. In order to provide a useful tool for researchers involved in this field, the manuscript also focuses on the tests conducted in the analyzed studies, mainly in terms of characteristics of the population involved and of the tasks used. Finally, the main trends related to sensor typology, sensor location and tasks have been identified.

Opinion & Special Articles: Professionalism in neurology Maintaining patient rapport in a world of EMR

Health information technology is playing a critical role in fostering more efficient and effective health care systems by improving how information is recorded, organized, and exchanged through the use of electronic medical records (EMR). EMR are defined, according to the International Organization for Standardization, as “repositories of patient data in digital form, stored and exchanged securely, and accessible by multiple authorized users. They contain retrospective, concurrent, and prospective information, and their primary purpose is to support continuing, efficient, and quality integrated healthcare.”1

Neurodegeneration of brain networks in the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis–frontotemporal lobar degeneration (ALS–FTLD) continuum: evidence from MRI and MEG studies

Brain imaging techniques, especially those based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), have been increasingly applied to study multiple large-scale distributed brain networks in healthy people and neurological patients. With regard to neurodegenerative disorders, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), clinically characterized by the predominant loss of motor neurons and progressive weakness of voluntary muscles, and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), the second most common early-onset dementia, have been proven to share several clinical, neuropathological, genetic, and neuroimaging features. Specifically, overlapping or mildly diverging brain structural and functional connectivity patterns, mostly evaluated by advanced MRI techniques-such as diffusion tensor and resting-state functional MRI (DT-MRI, RS-fMRI)-have been described comparing several ALS and FTLD populations. Moreover, though only pioneering, promising clues on connectivity patterns in the ALS-FTLD continuum may derive from MEG investigations. We will herein overview the current state of knowledge concerning the most advanced neuroimaging findings associated with clinical and genetic patterns of neurodegeneration across the ALS-FTLD continuum, underlying the possibility that network-based approaches may be useful to develop novel biomarkers of disease for adequately designing and monitoring more appropriate treatment strategies.

Corrigendum to “The dark sides of amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis” [FEBS Lett. 588 (5) (2014) 641–652]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.febslet.2014.11.012 0014-5793/ 2014 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. DOI of original article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.febslet.2013.12.038 ⇑ Corresponding author at: Dipartimento di Scienze Motorie e del Benessere, Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, Naples, Italy. Fax: +39 081 7483526. E-mail address: giuseppe.sorrentino@uniparthenope.it (G. Sorrentino). Pierpaolo Sorrentino , Antonietta Iuliano , Arianna Polverino , Francesca Jacini , Giuseppe Sorrentino b,c,⇑

A Brain Connectivity Metric Based on Phase Linearity Measurement

The analysis of brain connectivity is gaining interest in recent years due to the relevant information it carries about the functioning of the brain in health and in disease. In brief, it consists in measuring the statistical dependencies between signals generated by different brain regions. Several metrics have been proposed in literature, related to three families: amplitude based, phase based on jointly amplitude and phase based. Due to the large amount of noise that typically affects the estimation of the connectivity maps, averaging over several epochs of a population is normally carried out. We propose a novel phase based metric, namely the Phase Linearity Metric (PLM), that is resilient to noise and volume conduction, bearing promise to lower the number of epochs needed for a reliable measurement. The comparison with the widely adopted PLI connectivity metric confirms the effectiveness of the PLM.

A Novel Brain Functional Connectivity Measurement Based on Phase Similarity

A novel metric for estimating connectivity between brain areas, namely the Phase Linearity Measurement (PLM), is presented. The purpose consists in measuring the amount of information exchanged between brain areas. Such scope is achieved by analyzing the similarities between the recorded signal phases. The PLM has been designed for exploiting both Electroencephalographic (EEG) and Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data. We compared the results achieved by PLM in case of real MEG data with a widely adopted phase based connectivity metric, the Phase Lag Index (PLI). The PLM is characterized by interesting results, mainly in terms of noise resiliency.

Correction: Rucco, R.; et al. Type and Location of Wearable Sensors for Monitoring Falls during Static and Dynamic Tasks in Healthy Elderly: A Review. Sensors 2018, 18, 1613

The authors wish to make a correction to their paper [1]. The following Table 1 should be replaced with the table shown below it[...].

Brain functional networks become more connected as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis progresses: a source level magnetoencephalographic study

This study hypothesizes that the brain shows hyper connectedness as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) progresses. 54 patients (classified as “early stage” or “advanced stage”) and 25 controls underwent magnetoencephalography and MRI recordings. The activity of the brain areas was reconstructed, and the synchronization between them was estimated in the classical frequency bands using the phase lag index. Brain topological metrics such as the leaf fraction (number of nodes with degree of 1), the degree divergence (a measure of the scale-freeness) and the degree correlation (a measure of disassortativity) were estimated. Betweenness centrality was used to estimate the centrality of the brain areas. In all frequency bands, it was evident that, the more advanced the disease, the more connected, scale-free and disassortative the brain networks. No differences were evident in specific brain areas. Such modified brain topology is sub-optimal as compared to controls. Within this framework, our study shows that brain networks become more connected according to disease staging in ALS patients.

Functional Role of Internal and External Visual Imagery: Preliminary Evidences from Pilates

The present study investigates whether a functional difference between the visualization of a sequence of movements in the perspective of the first- (internal VMI-I) or third- (external VMI-E) person exists, which might be relevant to promote learning. By using a mental chronometry experimental paradigm, we have compared the time or execution, imagination in the VMI-I perspective, and imagination in the VMI-E perspective of two kinds of Pilates exercises. The analysis was carried out in individuals with different levels of competence (expert, novice, and no-practice individuals). Our results showed that in the Expert group, in the VMI-I perspective, the imagination time was similar to the execution time, while in the VMI-E perspective, the imagination time was significantly lower than the execution time. An opposite pattern was found in the Novice group, in which the time of imagination was similar to that of execution only in the VMI-E perspective, while in the VMI-I perspective, the time of imagination was significantly lower than the time of execution. In the control group, the times of both modalities of imagination were significantly lower than the execution time for each exercise. The present data suggest that, while the VMI-I serves to train an already internalised gesture, the VMI-E perspective could be useful to learn, and then improve, the recently acquired sequence of movements. Moreover, visual imagery is not useful for individuals that lack a specific motor experience. The present data offer new insights in the application of mental training techniques, especially in field of sports. However, further investigations are needed to better understand the functional role of internal and external visual imagery.