Objective To investigate the clinical prognosis of idiopathic demyelinating optic neuritis (IDON), the rate of its conversion to multiple sclerosis (MS) or neuromyelitis optica (NMO) and its clinical features related to the conversion.Methods Patients satisfying our entry criteria for IDON hospitalized in Beijing Tongren Hospital during the period from 2002 to 2007 were re-evaluated with follow-ups for 6-months to 5-years.The McDonald diagnostic criteria for MS (revised, 2005) was used to diagnose MS in these subjects during follow-up and the diagnosis of NMO utilized 1999 Wingerchuk' s NMO criteria.The Chi-Squared χ2 test was applied to statistically analyze association of clinical features and development of MS or NMO.Results In 107 recruited IDON cases with complete clinical data and follow-up, 12 cases (11.2%) developed into MS or NMO during follow-up period.All 12 cases met the revised McDonald criteria, of which 4 cases met NMO criteria and the remaining eight cases showed some clinical evidence of "optic-spinal MS (OS-MS)".A significantly higher conversion rate of 23.1% was found in recurrent IDON than the 4.4% in single-episode cases (χ2 = 6.899, P < 0.01) .Convesion rate of female patiends (17.2%) is significantly higher than male patients (4.1%, χ2 = 4.620, P < 0.05).Conversion rate of 18.2% in patients with initially abnormal brain MRI was higher than rate of 8.1% in cases with normal brain MRI, but the difference was not statistically significant.No difference was found between presence or absence of swollen disc, nor severity of vision loss.Conclusions In a group of IDON patients, 11.2% developed into MS and NMO or clinically indicative OS-MS.Recurrent IDON and female gender suggested higher risk of developing MS or NMO.

Objective To investigate the neural mechanisms of speech motor control in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) under different strategies of motor execution control.MethodsThe techniques of the psychoacoustic and event-related potentials (ERPs) based on the altered auditory feedback paradigm were used in the present study. Two groups, including 17 PD patients and 17 healthy controls, were instructed to produce sustained vowels under the internal and external cueing tasks while hearing their voice randomly pitch-shifted downwards. The vocal responses and associated ERPs were recorded and compared across the groups and tasks.ResultsBehavioral results showed that the amplitude of acoustic compensation response was larger in PD patients than in the healthy controls (F=5.415, P=0.027), however, the main effect was not significant in the tasks (F=0.039, P=0.840). At the cortical level, PD patients produced significantly larger N1 responses to pitch perturbations in the internal cueing task related to the external cueing task (F=8.634, P=0.006), while such task effect was not observed in the healthy controls (F=1.550, P=0.231). Also, PD patients produced significantly larger N1 responses than the healthy controls in the internal cueing condition (F=5.476, P=0.026), but not in the external cueing condition (F=0.249, P=0.621). Conclusion Speech motor control in PD can be influenced by the strategies of motor execution control. Compared to the internal cueing task, the external cueing task can increase neural efficiency in the encoding of speech auditory feedback PD patients that improve auditory-motor integration for speech production.