Background and Aims:

Methods:

Consecutive Parkinson's disease patients underwent a comprehensive motor and non motor evaluation and geriatric assessment using multidimensional prognostic index (MPI). A subset of 60 patients underwent MRI with assessment of atrophy and white matter hyoperintensities by visual rating

Results:

One-hundred sixty five outpatients with PD diagnosis (mean age 68.8 y, mean disease duration 8.3 years) entered the study. Pre-Frailty assessed by MPI was presented by 38.5 % of patients and correlated with age and disease duration. When adjusting for these variables, MPI correlated with UPDRS-III, non motor symptoms assessed by UMSAR, prevalence of prevalence of orthostatic hypotension, RBD and depression. At 2-years follow-up, frailty predict worse cognitive and motor progression when adjusted for disease burden.

Conclusions:

Frailty is a possible important modulator of pathology and brain vulnerability in Parkinson's disease and could explain different severity in motor and non motor symptoms. Longitudinal studies are warranted to evaluate the impact of frailty in disease progression.

Background and Aims:

Background: Several preclinical and clinical investigations have claimed a strong relationship between neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the brain. No study evaluated the effect of acute neuroinflammation on CSF levels of amyloid and tau markers in vivo.

Objective: evaluate the correlation between acute neuroinflammation, neuronal, glial and amyloid markers in CSF of subjects with acute inflammation of the brain

Methods:

Methods: Sixty subjects who underwent CSF analyses were included, namely 42 encephalitis (ENC), and 18 healthy controls (HC). Each subject underwent an extended panel of CSF markers, namely Aβ40, 42 and 38, neuronal (NfL, T-tau), and glial (GFAP) testing. Linear and non-linear correlations between CSF biomarkers were evaluated studying conditional independence relationships following a graphical model approach.

Results:

Results: ENC showed increased CSF levels of neuronal/glial markers whereas amyloid related markers (aβ40, 42 and 38) did not differ compared to controls. No correlation was observed between levels of neuronal/glial and Aβ markers in conditional independence analysis.

Conclusions:

Conclusions: this is the first demonstration based on CSF biomarkers that acute neuroinflammation does not directly impact on amyloid pathways but correlated with glial and neuronal markers in vivo.

Background and Aims:

Objective: Several preclinical and clinical investigations have argued for nervous system involvement in SARS-CoV-2 infection. No data about clinical, imaging and biomarkers presentations as well as long-term outcomes are available for SARS-CoV-2 encephalitis in comparison with infectious and autoimmune encephalitis.

Methods:

Methods: The ENCOVID European registry included patients with probable or definite diagnosis of encephalitis with and without SARS-CoV-2 infection admitted for hospitalization in the European recruiting centers between February 1^st 2020 and March 30^th, 2021. Each patient underwent a standardized assessment including full infectious screening, CSF, EEG, MRI data. Clinical presentation and laboratory markers, severity of COVID-19 disease, response to treatment and outcomes were recorded.

Results:

Results – Out of 155 cases screened, forty-five cases of encephalitis positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection and 63 without COVID-19 with full available data were included. SARS-CoV-2 encephalitis exhibited common presentation with aphasia and dysarthria compared to non-COVID- encephalitis and exhibited higher prevalence of patients with normal MRI but mild hyperproteinorracchia/pleocytosis. Most SARS-CoV-2 cases appeared during the onset of COVID-19 and exhibited different response to treatment and long-term outcomes compared to non COVID encephalitis.

Conclusions:

Conclusions –The registry identified a wide spectrum of encephalitis associated with COVID19 infection, with clinical characteristics and course different from classical infectious and autoimmune encephalitis. Biomarkers studies are warranted in order to evaluate the specific inflammatory pathways associated with SARS-Cov-2 encephalitis.