Made by DATEXIS (Data Science and Text-based Information Systems) at Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin
Deep Learning Technology: Sebastian Arnold, Betty van Aken, Paul Grundmann, Felix A. Gers and Alexander Löser. Learning Contextualized Document Representations for Healthcare Answer Retrieval. The Web Conference 2020 (WWW'20)
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Bálint's syndrome has been found in patients with bilateral damage to the posterior parietal cortex. The primary cause of the damage and the syndrome can originate from multiple strokes, Alzheimer's disease, intracranial tumors, or brain injury. Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease have also been found to cause this kind of damage. This syndrome is caused by damage to the posterior superior watershed areas, also known as the parietal-occipital vascular border zone (Brodmann's areas 19 and 7).
Lack of awareness of the syndrome may lead to misdiagnosis such as blindness, psychosis, or dementia. Symptoms of Bálint's syndrome are most likely to be noticed first by therapists providing rehabilitation following brain lesions. However, due to the scarcity among practitioners of familiarity with the syndrome, the symptoms are often explained away incorrectly without being considered as a possibility and followed by medical confirmation of clinical and neuroradiological findings. Any severe disturbance of space representation, spontaneously appearing following bilateral parietal damage, strongly suggests the presence of Bálint's syndrome and should be investigated as such. One study reports that damage to the bilateral dorsal occipitoparietal regions appeared to be involved in Bálint's syndrome.
Simultanagnosia (or simultagnosia) is a rare neurological disorder characterized by the inability of an individual to perceive more than a single object at a time. This type of visual attention problem is one of three major components (the others being optic ataxia and optic apraxia) of Bálint's syndrome, an uncommon and incompletely understood variety of severe neuropsychological impairments involving space representation (visuospatial processing). The term "simultanagnosia" was first coined in 1924 by Wolpert to describe a condition where the affected individual could see individual details of a complex scene but failed to grasp the overall meaning of the image.
Simultanagnosia can be divided into two different categories: dorsal and ventral. Ventral occipito-temporal lesions cause a mild form of the disorder, while dorsal occipito-parietal lesions cause a more severe form of the disorder.
Patients with simultanagnosia, a component of Bálint's syndrome, have a restricted spatial window of visual attention and cannot see more than one object at a time in a scene that contains more than one object. For instance, if presented with an image of a table containing both food and various utensils, a patient will report seeing only one item, such as a spoon. If the patient's attention is redirected to another object in the scene, such as a glass, the patient will report that they see the glass but no longer see the spoon. As a result of this impairment, simultanagnosic patients often fail to comprehend the overall meaning of a scene.
In addition, patients note that one stationary object may spontaneously disappear from view as they become aware of another object in the scene.
Simultanagnosic patients often exhibit a phenomenon known as "local capture" where they only identify the local elements of stimuli containing local and global features. However, recent studies have demonstrated that implicit processing of the global structure can occur. With the appropriate stimulus conditions, explicit processing of the global form may occur. For example, a study performed with Navon hierarchical letters, which are large letters composed of smaller ones, revealed that the use of smaller and denser Navon letters biased the patient towards global processing.
Due to the subjective nature of autotopagnosia, there are many hypotheses presented as to the underlying causation. Since the condition by definition is an inability to recognize the human body and its parts, the disorder could stem from a language deficit specific to body parts. On the other hand, the patient could suffer from a disrupted body image or a variation of the inability to separate parts from whole. It is also believed that autotopagnosia has multiple underlying causes that cannot be categorized as either language-specific or body-image-specific. The rarity of autotopagnosia, frequently combined with the manifestation of other psychoneurological disorders, makes the prime cause extremely difficult to study. In many cases, one of these accompanying conditions—often aphasia—could be masking the patient’s autotopagnosia altogether.
Although it is still unclear what precise deficits in brain function cause the symptoms of autotopagnosia, the location of brain damage is not as ambiguous. Autotopagnosia is most often attributed to lesions in the parietal lobe of the left hemisphere of the brain. However, it is also believed that the disorder can be caused by general brain damage as well. Many different types of brain lesions can cause autotopagnosia; however, neoplastic lesions seem to be the most common. “Pure” autotopagnosia is often seen with smaller lesions, as larger lesions tend to create other unseen deficits that can confuse or mask the appearance of the symptoms of autotopagnosia—such as aphasia, as discussed above.
The parietal lobe is involved in the integration of sensory information and visuospatial processing. The left parietal lobe, specifically, is important to the understanding of language and mathematics, and has a more prominent role for right handed people.
Adie's syndrome is not life-threatening or disabling. As such, there is no mortality rate relating to the condition; however, loss of deep tendon reflexes is permanent and may progress over time.
It most commonly affects younger women (2.6:1 female preponderance) and is unilateral in 80% of cases. Average age of onset is 32 years.
Mirhosseini–Holmes–Walton syndrome is a syndrome which involves retinal degeneration, cataract, microcephaly, and mental retardation. It was first characterized in 1972.
There is evidence that this syndrome has a different mutation in the same gene as Cohen syndrome.
A syndrome is a set of medical signs and symptoms occurring together, constitutes a particular disease or disorder. The word derives from the Greek σύνδρομον, meaning "concurrence". In some instances, a syndrome is so closely linked with a pathogenesis or cause that the words "syndrome", "disease", and "disorder" end up being used interchangeably for them. This is especially true of inherited syndromes. For example, Down syndrome, Wolf–Hirschhorn syndrome, and Andersen syndrome are disorders with known pathogeneses, so each is more than just a set of signs and symptoms, despite the "syndrome" nomenclature. In other instances, a syndrome is not specific to only one disease. For example, toxic shock syndrome can be caused by various toxins; premotor syndrome can be caused by various brain lesions; and premenstrual syndrome is not a disease but simply a set of symptoms.
If an underlying genetic cause is suspected but not known, a condition may be referred to as a genetic association (often just "association" in context). By definition, an association indicates that the collection of signs and symptoms occurs in combination more frequently than would be likely by chance alone.
Syndromes are often named after the physician or group of physicians that discovered them or initially described the full clinical picture. Such eponymous syndrome names are examples of medical eponyms. Recently, there has been a shift towards naming conditions descriptively (by symptoms or underlying cause) rather than eponymously, but the eponymous syndrome names often persist in common usage.
The prognosis varies widely from case to case, depending on the severity of the symptoms. However, almost all people reported with Aicardi syndrome to date have experienced developmental delay of a significant degree, typically resulting in mild to moderate to profound intellectual disability. The age range of the individuals reported with Aicardi syndrome is from birth to the mid 40s.
There is no cure for this syndrome.
In medicine a broad definition of syndrome is used, which describes a collection of symptoms and findings without necessarily tying them to a single identifiable pathogenesis. The more specific definition employed in medical genetics describes a subset of all medical syndromes.
Williams syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder that affects many parts of the body. Facial features frequently include a broad forehead, short nose, and full cheeks, an appearance that has been described as "elfin". Mild to moderate intellectual disability with particular problems with visual spatial tasks such as drawing and fewer problems with language are typical. Those affected often have an outgoing personality and interact readily with strangers. Problems with teeth, heart problems, especially supravalvular aortic stenosis, and periods of high blood calcium are common.
Williams syndrome is caused by a genetic abnormality, specifically a deletion of about 27 genes from the long arm of one of the two chromosome 7s. Typically this occurs as a random event during the formation of the egg or sperm from which a person develops. In a small number of cases it is inherited from an affected parent in an autosomal dominant manner. The different characteristic features have been linked to the loss of specific genes. The diagnosis is typically suspected based on symptoms and confirmed by genetic testing.
Treatment includes special education programs and various types of therapy. Surgery may be done to correct heart problems. Dietary changes or medications may be required for high blood calcium. The syndrome was first described in 1961 by New Zealander John C. P. Williams. Williams syndrome affects between 1 in 7,500 to 1 in 20,000 people at birth. Life expectancy is less than that of the general population mostly due to the increased rates of heart disease.
Williams syndrome is a microdeletion syndrome caused by the spontaneous deletion of genetic material from the region q11.23 of one member of the pair of chromosome 7, so that the person is hemizygous for those genes. The deleted region includes more than 25 genes, and researchers believe that being hemizygous for these genes probably contributes to the characteristic features of this syndrome. "CLIP2", "ELN", "GTF2I", "GTF2IRD1", and "LIMK1" are among the genes that are typically deleted from one chromosome in people with Williams syndrome. Researchers have found this hemizygosity for the "ELN" gene, which codes for the protein elastin, is associated with the connective-tissue abnormalities and cardiovascular disease (specifically supravalvular aortic stenosis and supravalvular pulmonary stenosis) found in many people with this syndrome. The insufficient supply of elastin may also be the cause of full cheeks, harsh or hoarse voice, hernias and bladder diverticula often found in those with Williams syndrome. Studies suggest that hemizygosity in "LIMK1", "GTF2I", "GTF2IRD1", and perhaps other genes may help explain the characteristic difficulties with visual–spatial tasks. Additionally, there is evidence that the hemizygosity in several of these genes, including "CLIP2", may contribute to the unique behavioral characteristics, learning disabilities, and other cognitive difficulties seen in Williams syndrome.
Amnesia can result from a side-effect of prescription or non-prescription drugs. Both substance use and alcohol can cause both long-term and short-term memory loss, resulting in blackouts.
The most commonly used group of prescription drugs which can produce amnesia are benzodiazepines, especially if combined with alcohol, however, in limited quantities, triazolam (Halcion) is not associated with amnesia or memory impairment.
Almost all reported cases of Aicardi syndrome have been in girls. The few boys that have been identified with Aicardi syndrome have proved to have 47 chromosomes including an XXY sex chromosome complement, a condition called Klinefelter syndrome.
All cases of Aicardi syndrome are thought to be due to new mutations. No person with Aicardi syndrome is known to have transmitted the X-linked gene responsible for the syndrome to the next generation.
Drug-induced amnesia is amnesia caused by drugs. Amnesia may be therapeutic for medical treatment or for medical procedures, or it may be a side-effect of a drug, such as alcohol, or certain medications for psychiatric disorders, such as benzodiazepines.
In the United States, sarcoidosis has a prevalence of approximately 10 cases per 100,000 whites and 36 cases per 100,000 blacks. Heerfordt syndrome is present in 4.1–5.6% of those with sarcoidosis.
Since Usher syndrome results from the loss of a gene, gene therapy that adds the proper protein back ("gene replacement") may alleviate it, provided the added protein becomes functional. Recent studies of mouse models have shown one form of the disease—that associated with a mutation in myosin VIIa—can be alleviated by replacing the mutant gene using a lentivirus. However, some of the mutated genes associated with Usher syndrome encode very large proteins—most notably, the "USH2A" and "GPR98" proteins, which have roughly 6000 amino-acid residues. Gene replacement therapy for such large proteins may be difficult.
Usher syndrome, also known as Hallgren syndrome, Usher-Hallgren syndrome, retinitis pigmentosa-dysacusis syndrome, or dystrophia retinae dysacusis syndrome, is an extremely rare genetic disorder caused by a mutation in any one of at least 11 genes resulting in a combination of hearing loss and visual impairment. It is a leading cause of deafblindness and is at present incurable.
Usher syndrome is classed into three subtypes according to onset and severity of symptoms. All three subtypes are caused by mutations in genes involved in the function of the inner ear and retina. These mutations are inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern.
If the Hirschsprung's disease is treated in time, ABCD sufferers live otherwise healthy lives. If it is not found soon enough, death often occurs in infancy. For those suffering hearing loss, it is generally regressive and the damage to hearing increases over time. Digestive problems from the colostomy and reattachment may exist, but most cases can be treated with laxatives. The only other debilitating symptom is hearing loss, which is usually degenerative and can only be treated with surgery or hearing aids.
One case of Cohen Syndrome, in a Palestinian boy from Tul-Karem, was reported in the Israeli monthly Kol Israel BeAsakim (in Hebrew) in the December 2007 issue. Over the past several years there have been approximately 50 new cases worldwide. There are population groups with this condition in Australia, the UK and the US. It still seems to go undiagnosed leaving the number of cases less than 500.
Risk factors for Holmes tremor include excess exposure to heavy metals, such as mercury and lead, as well as an increased intake of various drugs and toxins. Researchers found that raising the dose of antidepressants or neuroleptics elevate the risk for developing Holmes tremor. Increasing intake of coffee, tea, or other stimulants can also cause for greater risk of development. Tremors depend on dosage and amount of exposure to these factors and will typically decrease dramatically if the intake is reduced. Hyperthyroidism and hyperglycemia also increase the likelihood of developing Holmes tremor.
Cohen syndrome (also known as Pepper syndrome or Cervenka syndrome, named after Michael Cohen, William Pepper and Jaroslav Cervenka, who researched the illness) is a genetic disorder.
Similar to the causes of most tremors, Holmes tremor is triggered by lesion damage to a circuit controlling a physiological task such as precision movements, motor learning, the control of muscle groups, etc. Holmes tremor specifically occurs as a delayed reaction to lesion damage of the dopaminergic and cerebellothalamic systems. The most common cause of this lesion damage is brainstem stroke and trauma. The lesion damage to the dopamine pathways is associated with the neurological signs and symptoms.