Background Intensive rehabilitation of patients after severe traumatic brain injury aims to improve functional outcome. The effect of initiating rehabilitation in the early phase, in the form of head-up mobilization, is unclear. Objective To assess whether early mobilization is feasible and safe in patients with traumatic brain injury admitted to a neurointensive care unit. Methods This was a randomized parallel-group clinical trial, including patients with severe traumatic brain injury (Glasgow coma scale less then 11 and admission to the neurointensive care unit). The intervention consisted of daily mobilization on a tilt-table for 4 weeks. The control group received standard care. Outcomes were the number of included participants relative to all patients with traumatic brain injury who were approached for inclusion, the number of conducted mobilization sessions relative to all planned sessions, as well as adverse events and reactions. Information on clinical outcome was collected for exploratory purposes. Results Thirty-eight participants were included (19 in each group), corresponding to 76% of all approached patients [95% confidence interval (CI) 63-86%]. In the intervention group, 74% [95% CI 52-89%] of planned sessions were carried out. There was no difference in the number of adverse events, serious adverse events, or adverse reactions between the groups. Conclusions Early head-up mobilization is feasible in patients with severe traumatic brain injury. Larger randomized clinical trials are needed to explore potential benefits and harms of such an intervention. Clinical Trial Registration [ClinicalTrials.gov], identifier [NCT02924649]. Registered on 3rd October 2016.Background Neuroimaging shows considerable promise in generating sensitive and objective outcome measures for therapeutic trials across a range of neurodegenerative conditions. For volumetric measures the current gold standard is manual delineation, which is unfeasible for samples sizes required for large clinical trials. Methods Using a cohort of early Huntington's disease (HD) patients (n = 46) and controls (n = 35), we compared the performance of four automated segmentation tools (FIRST, FreeSurfer, STEPS, MALP-EM) with manual delineation for generating cross-sectional caudate volume, a region known to be vulnerable in HD. We then examined the effect of each of these baseline regions on the ability to detect change over 15 months using the established longitudinal Caudate Boundary Shift Integral (cBSI) method, an automated longitudinal pipeline requiring a baseline caudate region as an input. Results All tools, except Freesurfer, generated significantly smaller caudate volumes than the manually derived regions. Jaccard indices showed poorer levels of overlap between each automated segmentation and manual delineation in the HD patients compared with controls. Nevertheless, each method was able to demonstrate significant group differences in volume (p less then 0.001). STEPS performed best qualitatively as well as quantitively in the baseline analysis. Caudate atrophy measures generated by the cBSI using automated baseline regions were largely consistent with those derived from a manually segmented baseline, with STEPS providing the most robust cBSI values across both control and HD groups. Conclusions Atrophy measures from the cBSI were relatively robust to differences in baseline segmentation technique, suggesting that fully automated pipelines could be used to generate outcome measures for clinical trials.Purpose Patent foramen ovale (PFO) is associated with ischemic stroke, especially in patients with embolic stroke of undetermined source. This study aims to evaluate the presence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in ischemic stroke patients with PFO. Methods We systematically searched EMBASE and MEDLINE databases on May 21, 2020 for studies that analyzed the presence of AF in patients with PFO. The primary outcome was the presence of AF in patients with PFO compared with those without. Outcomes were pooled using a random-effects model using the method of DerSimonian and Laird. We recorded demographic characteristics and the methods used for AF detection in the studies included (unspecified, history/medical records review, ECG, Holter monitor, or loop recorder). Results A total of 14 studies and 13,245 patients fulfilled the entry criteria. The average age was 61.2 years and 41.3% of the participants were female. There was a lower risk of AF in patients with PFO compared with those without (RR 0.52, 95% confidence interval, 0.41-0.63, p less then 0.001). There was no evidence of heterogeneity. The lower risk of AF was found in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies and in studies stratified by average age ( less then 60 or ≥60) and in cryptogenic stroke. Meta-regression by PFO detection technique suggested that studies using transoesophageal echocardiogram for PFO detection reported higher risk of AF (1.39, 95% confidence interval 1.14-1.70, p = 0.004). Conclusion The presence of a PFO in patients with ischemic stroke/TIA may be associated with a lower risk of AF. Few studies have estimated the risk of future AF in patients with PFO.Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that often involves impaired cognition, communication difficulties and restrictive, repetitive behaviors. ASD is extremely heterogeneous both clinically and etiologically, which represents one of the greatest challenges in studying the molecular underpinnings of ASD. While hundreds of ASD-associated genes have been identified that confer varying degrees of risk, no single gene variant accounts for >1% of ASD cases. Notably, a large number of ASD-risk genes function as epigenetic regulators, indicating potential epigenetic dysregulation in ASD. selleck chemical As such, we compared genome-wide DNA methylation (DNAm) in the blood of children with ASD (n = 265) to samples from age- and sex-matched, neurotypical controls (n = 122) using the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 arrays. Results While DNAm patterns did not distinctly separate ASD cases from controls, our analysis identified an epigenetically unique subset of ASD cases (n = 32); these individuals exhibited significant differential methylation from both controls than the remaining ASD cases.