CASE Eric (12 years old, 6th grade) saw a new pediatrician with concern about fatigue and intermittent abdominal pain for the past 2 to 3 months. His mother observed that he appeared more tired and that the “whites of his eyes are more cloudy” than usual. He continued to be active, however, and reported that he played basketball and football without any problems. He slept 8 hours each night wit...

We report the cases of a father and his son with spinocerebellar ataxia type 7 (SCA7), a disorder rarely reported in Japan. The father had noticed dysarthria at age 38, and gait instability at age 46. Visual disturbance was noted 3 years later. Neurological examination at age 54 revealed visual disturbance, dysarthria, and cerebellar ataxia in all four extremities and the trunk. Cranial MRI sho...

The natural transmission of microdeletions of the Y chromosome is occasionally reported in the literature. Here we describe the natural transmission of a partial AZFb deletion over three generations. PCR amplification of several sequence tagged site markers in the three AZF regions of the Y chromosome was carried out in a patient with oligoasthenoteratozoospermia, his father and his naturally c...

DURING iTS two hundred and sixty-eight years of domination over the Maltese Islands (1530-1798), the Order of St. John of Jerusalem waged an unceasing war against the Barbary and Turkish pirates in the Mediterranean. Those who escaped death were enslaved by the victor, irrespective of sex or age, or whether they were combatants or simply passengers and crews of unarmed vessels; so much so that ...

I would first like to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation for awarding me this honour, of which I had never even dreamt. I was born in 1940, the son of a furniture craftsman in the city of Nagoya, in Japan. My father wanted to change his job and was taking a correspondence course to become an electrical engineer, while he was a trainee furniture craftsman. Howev...

despite the few data about mardâs in shâhnâme, the very high attention of scholars to him and his name is indebted to the importance of his son, zahhâk, in iranian mythology. the lack of any information about this personality in avesta, ambiguity of written forms of his name in pahlavi script in middle persian texts, multiplicity of the recorded forms in islamic texts and also the similarity of...