Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R R Weisz.
Limitation of extraocular movements in progressive supranuclear palsy is a significant and uncomfortable problem. Specially designed mirror-prism spectacles make it possible for these patients to read and feed themselves.
Colloid cyst of the third ventricle, although a benign lesion, carries with it high mortality and morbidity if not diagnosed in time. The most common presenting symptom is headache. A 31-year-old man with a history of intermittent, throbbing, unilateral headache and nausea was admitted because of exacerbation of his headache, which responded poorly to medication. A few hours after admission he became comatose. A colloid cyst of the third ventricle causing acute hydrocephaly was diagnosed by computed tomographic scan and removed in toto. Despite an uneventful postoperative course the patient was left with permanent bilateral cerebral damage. In patients with headache not responding to conventional medication, colloid cyst of the third ventricle perhaps should be ruled out, even if the symptoms are suggestive of vascular headache, such as migraine headache.
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A 50-year-old man was evaluated for paresthesia and pain affecting the left side of his body and face. The paresthesia and pain developed and progressed concomitantly with a resolving left hemiparesis attributed to a lacunar infarct occurring 5 months prior to admission. Computed tomography (CT) revealed a discrete lesion in the region of the dorsomedial margin of the nucleus ventralis posterior. To the many pathological reports localizing the lesion of the "thalamic syndrome," one can now add the CT verification of the lesion in vivo.
Focal sarcolemmal lesions, segmental degeneration, and fiber splitting are observed in Duchenne muscular dystrophy and have been proposed to be major contributory causes of dysfunction of this disease. The presence of these abnormalities should affect impulse conduction along the sarcolemma. To test this prediction, we measured conduction velocities of the action potential in normal and diseased human intercostal muscle fibers by means of intracellular microelectrodes. The resting potentials of fibers from patients with Duchenne dystrophy, Becker dystrophy, and motor neuron disease were partially depolarized, and conduction velocities in these fibers were slower than normal. When the membrane potential was artifically hyperpolarized, the conduction velocity in Becker dystrophy fibers was not significantly different from normal. However, conduction velocity values in Duchenne dystrophy or motor neuron disease fibers were significantly lower than normal regardless of the level of membrane hyperpolarization. These data are analyzed in light of the presence of morphologic lesions in the diseased muscle fibers.