Dear Editor, Researchers reported an association between vasectomy and primary progressive aphasia (PPA—a rare variety of frontotemporal dementia) in a 2006 manuscript in Cognitive Behavioral Neurology detailing a case–control study that compared 47 men with the disease to 57 controls. The rate of vasectomy in PPA patients was 40% (19/ 47) vs. 16% (9/57) in normal controls. This difference met ...

Recently a self-calibrating SMASH technique, AUTO-SMASH, was described. This technique is based on PPA with RF coil arrays using auto-calibration signals. In AUTO-SMASH, important coil sensitivity information required for successful SMASH reconstruction is obtained during the actual scan using the correlation between undersampled SMASH signal data and additionally sampled calibration signals wi...

Several studies have addressed visuospatial and executive skills in artistic activities in Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Objective To investigate the performance of FTLD patients compared to controls on two artistic tasks. Methods Four FTLD patients with mean age of 57 (8.7) years and schooling of 12.2 (4.5) years plus 10 controls with mean age of 62...

In the human brain, the inferior temporal cortex contains areas that seem to respond selectively to particular types of visual stimuli, such as faces or animals. One such region—the parahippocampal place area, or PPA—responds most strongly to images of places instead of faces, but how this higher-order selectivity is achieved remains unclear. In a new study in PLoS Biology, Rajimehr et al. iden...

A fluorometric method for the determination of phenylpyruvic acid (PPA) has been established. Benzaldehyde formed from PPA by alkaline decomposition is quantified by means of its fluorogenic reaction with 1,4-dimethyl-3-carbamoylpyridinium chloride. PPA can be determined in the range of 0.1-3 nmol/50 ƒÊl with the relative standard deviation of 4.0-4.1%. About 70% recovery was obtained when a ur...

The goal of this study was to determine the linearity of the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in category-selective regions of human visual cortex. We defined regions of the temporal lobe that were selective to faces (fusiform face area, FFA) and places (parahippocampal place area, PPA). We then determined the linearity o...

We develop a new threading algorithm MUSTER by extending the previous sequence profile-profile alignment method, PPA. It combines various sequence and structure information into single-body terms which can be conveniently used in dynamic programming search: (1) sequence profiles; (2) secondary structures; (3) structure fragment profiles; (4) solvent accessibility; (5) dihedral torsion angles; (...

The title oxazolidine compound, C(27)H(39)NO(2), was synthesized from N-isopropyl-norephedrine. The dihedral angle between the aromatic rings is 70.33 (5)°. The N atom of the heterocycle is oriented to allow intra-molecular O-H⋯N hydrogen bonding with the hydr-oxy substituent.

The title layered coordination polymer, [Cd(C(14)H(16)N(5)O(3))(2)](n) or [Cd(ppa)(2)](n), where ppa is 8-ethyl-5-oxo-2-(piperazin-1-yl)-5,8-dihydro-pyrido[2,3-d]pyrimidine-6-carboxyl-ate, was syn-thesized under hydro-thermal conditions. The Cd(II) atom (site symmetry 2) exhibits a distorted cis-CdN(2)O(4) octa-hedral geometry defined by two N-monodentate and two O,O'-bidentate ppa monoanions. ...

We describe an improved determination of phenylpyruvic acid (PPA) in blood plasma by ultraviolet spectrophotometric measurement of an enolborate complex. Sensitivity and recovery are well suited for accurate analy. sis in the range of 1.25 to 25 mg/liter. Sera from 10 fasting phenylketonuric subjects averaged 15.3 mg/liter (range, 4.8 to 25.0 mg/liter). A pronounced diurnal rhythm in plasma PPA...