Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to F Clifford-Rose.
A patient presented with a posterior uveitis. An inferior plaque of retinal exudation was seen. Full investigation failed to establish a cause until six weeks later, when cryptococcal meningitis developed. The patient was immunocompetent. Exudation in relation to retinal vessels is unusual in idiopathic posterior uveitis, and cryptococcosis should be considered in the differential. Diagnosis is by lumbar puncture or vitreous aspiration.
Support is provided for a primary neural factor in migraine by studies in autonomic responsiveness to sensory stimuli in relation to the laterality of pain. Migraineurs with consistently lateralised headaches were found in two studies to exhibit extremes of autonomic responsiveness to sensory stimuli during the interictal phase. The direction of responsiveness was predictive of the laterality of pain; left-sided pain was associated with under-responsiveness and fast habituation, right-sided pain with over-responsiveness and slow habituation. Bipolarity in rate of habituation is consistent with a defect in a regulatory mechanism that controls regional cerebral activation such as the diffuse thalamic projection system.
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Conditions have been developed for the culture of rat spinal cord neurons in serum-free media supplemented with hormones and growth factors. Neurons were identified by immunofluorescence-labeled anti-neurofilament antibody, and their growth was monitored by assay of choline acetyltransferase and cholinesterase activities. Activities of these enzymes were considerably higher than those of comparable cultures in serum supplemented media in which there were visibly many more nonneuronal cells. Serum immunoglobulins from patients with motor neuron disease showed enhanced binding to rat spinal cord cells maintained in both serum-supplemented and serum-free media, as compared with those from normal healthy individuals. Enhanced binding was more marked with the latter cells, presumably because of the higher proportion of neuronal cells in these cultures. Serum immunoglobulins from patients with other neurologic disorders showed a similar binding to that of the normal controls. The results demonstrate the presence of an immune response to spinal cord cell membrane components in patients with motor neuron disease, although whether the response is primary or secondary in the disease process remains unclear.
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