Garbled text messages may be the only symptoms of stroke

Public release date: 14-Mar-2013
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Contact: Dwight Angell
dwight.angell@hfhs.org
313-850-3471
Henry Ford Health System

DETROIT Difficulty or inability to write a coherent text message, even in patients who have no problem speaking, may become a "vital" tool in diagnosing a type of crippling stroke, according to new research at Henry Ford Hospital.

The case study focused on a 40-year-old man visiting the metro Detroit area on business who showed signs of "dystextia," a recently coined term for incoherent text messaging that can sometimes be confused with autocorrect garble. But in his case, the man saw nothing wrong with the garble.

The patient had no problem with a routine bedside test of his language abilities including fluency of speech, reading, writing, comprehension and other factors. However, when asked to type a simple text message, he not only produced garble, but he was unable to see it as such.

Despite showing only slight facial asymmetry and no other symptoms, doctors determined the man had suffered an acute ischemic stroke, in which a clot or other blockage cuts off blood supply to part of the brain. Such strokes usually result in some form of physical impairment and can be fatal.

The report is will be presented March 19th during the annual scientific meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in San Diego.

Omran Kaskar, M.D., a neurologist at Henry Ford Hospital and lead author of the research, said it illustrates how dystextia can be the only symptom of stroke-related aphasia a partial or sometimes total inability to form or understand language.

"Text messaging is a common form of communication with more than 75 billion texts sent each month," Dr. Kaskar said. "Besides the time-honored tests we use to determine aphasia in diagnosing stroke, checking for dystextia may well become a vital tool in making such a determination."

Dr. Kaskar added, "Because text messages are always time-stamped when they're sent they may also help establish when the stroke symptoms were at least present or even when they began," a key component in determining inclusion for IV thrombolytic therapy and or acute intervention.

The patient described in the Henry Ford research report had sent a message to his wife shortly after midnight the night before he went to the hospital. She described it as "disjointed, non-fluent, and incomprehensible."

It said, "Oh baby your;" and was followed by "I am happy." Two minutes later: "I am out of it, just woke up, can't make sense, I can't even type, call if ur awake, love you."

The next day, after doctors found no visible neurological problems except a slight weakness on the right side of his face, and the patient had no trouble in handling the traditional bedside evaluation of language abilities, he was handed a smartphone and asked to type, "the doctor needs a new blackberry."

Instead, he texted, "Tjhe Doctor nddds a new bb." When asked if it was correct, the researchers reported, he did not recognize any typing errors.

Once it was determined that the man had suffered an acute ischemic stroke, the doctors concluded that checking for dystextia may become a vitally important diagnostic tool, particularly for patients who show no other clear symptoms.

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Funding: Henry Ford Hospital

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Public release date: 14-Mar-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Dwight Angell
dwight.angell@hfhs.org
313-850-3471
Henry Ford Health System

DETROIT Difficulty or inability to write a coherent text message, even in patients who have no problem speaking, may become a "vital" tool in diagnosing a type of crippling stroke, according to new research at Henry Ford Hospital.

The case study focused on a 40-year-old man visiting the metro Detroit area on business who showed signs of "dystextia," a recently coined term for incoherent text messaging that can sometimes be confused with autocorrect garble. But in his case, the man saw nothing wrong with the garble.

The patient had no problem with a routine bedside test of his language abilities including fluency of speech, reading, writing, comprehension and other factors. However, when asked to type a simple text message, he not only produced garble, but he was unable to see it as such.

Despite showing only slight facial asymmetry and no other symptoms, doctors determined the man had suffered an acute ischemic stroke, in which a clot or other blockage cuts off blood supply to part of the brain. Such strokes usually result in some form of physical impairment and can be fatal.

The report is will be presented March 19th during the annual scientific meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in San Diego.

Omran Kaskar, M.D., a neurologist at Henry Ford Hospital and lead author of the research, said it illustrates how dystextia can be the only symptom of stroke-related aphasia a partial or sometimes total inability to form or understand language.

"Text messaging is a common form of communication with more than 75 billion texts sent each month," Dr. Kaskar said. "Besides the time-honored tests we use to determine aphasia in diagnosing stroke, checking for dystextia may well become a vital tool in making such a determination."

Dr. Kaskar added, "Because text messages are always time-stamped when they're sent they may also help establish when the stroke symptoms were at least present or even when they began," a key component in determining inclusion for IV thrombolytic therapy and or acute intervention.

The patient described in the Henry Ford research report had sent a message to his wife shortly after midnight the night before he went to the hospital. She described it as "disjointed, non-fluent, and incomprehensible."

It said, "Oh baby your;" and was followed by "I am happy." Two minutes later: "I am out of it, just woke up, can't make sense, I can't even type, call if ur awake, love you."

The next day, after doctors found no visible neurological problems except a slight weakness on the right side of his face, and the patient had no trouble in handling the traditional bedside evaluation of language abilities, he was handed a smartphone and asked to type, "the doctor needs a new blackberry."

Instead, he texted, "Tjhe Doctor nddds a new bb." When asked if it was correct, the researchers reported, he did not recognize any typing errors.

Once it was determined that the man had suffered an acute ischemic stroke, the doctors concluded that checking for dystextia may become a vitally important diagnostic tool, particularly for patients who show no other clear symptoms.

###

Funding: Henry Ford Hospital

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/hfhs-gtm031313.php

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DNA study clarifies how polar bears and brown bears are related

Mar. 14, 2013 ? At the end of the last ice age, a population of polar bears was stranded by the receding ice on a few islands in southeastern Alaska. Male brown bears swam across to the islands from the Alaskan mainland and mated with female polar bears, eventually transforming the polar bear population into brown bears.

Evidence for this surprising scenario emerged from a new genetic study of polar bears and brown bears led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The findings, published March 14 in PLOS Genetics, upend prevailing ideas about the evolutionary history of the two species, which are closely related and known to produce fertile hybrids.

Previous studies suggested that past hybridization had resulted in all polar bears having genes that came from brown bears. But the new study indicates that episodes of gene flow between the two species occurred only in isolated populations and did not affect the larger polar bear population, which remains free of brown bear genes.

At the center of the confusion is a population of brown bears that live on Alaska's Admiralty, Baranof, and Chicagof Islands, known as the ABC Islands. These bears--clearly brown bears in appearance and behavior--have striking genetic similarities to polar bears.

"This population of brown bears stood out as being really weird genetically, and there's been a long controversy about their relationship to polar bears. We can now explain it, and instead of the convoluted history some have proposed, it's a very simple story," said coauthor Beth Shapiro, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

Shapiro and her colleagues analyzed genome-wide DNA sequence data from seven polar bears, an ABC Islands brown bear, a mainland Alaskan brown bear, and a black bear. The study also included genetic data from other bears that was recently published by other researchers. Shapiro's team found that polar bears are a remarkably homogeneous species with no evidence of brown bear ancestry, whereas the ABC Islands brown bears show clear evidence of polar bear ancestry.

A key finding is that the polar bear ancestry of ABC Islands brown bears is conspicuously enriched in the maternally inherited X chromosome. About 6.5 percent of the X chromosomes of the ABC Islands bears came recently from polar bears, compared to about 1 percent of the rest of their genome. This means that the ABC Islands brown bears share more DNA with polar bear females than they do with polar bear males, Shapiro said.

To understand how hybridization could lead to this unexpected result, the team ran simulations of various demographic scenarios. "Of all the models we tested, the best supported was the scenario in which male brown bears wandered onto the islands and gradually transformed the population from polar bears into brown bears," said first author James Cahill, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

This scenario is consistent with the known behavior of brown bears and polar bears, according to coauthor Ian Stirling, a biologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Mixing of polar bears and brown bears is seen today in the Canadian Beaufort Sea, where adult male brown bears wander onto the remaining sea ice in late spring and sometimes mate with female polar bears, he said. In areas such as western Hudson Bay and the Russian coast, polar bears are spending more time on land in response to climate warming and loss of sea ice, a behavior that could have left polar bears stranded on the ABC Islands at the end of the last ice age.

Young male brown bears tend to leave the area where they were born in search of new territory. They may well have dispersed across the water from the Alaskan mainland to the ABC Islands and hybridized with polar bears stranded there when the sea ice disappeared.

"The combination of genetics and the known behavior of brown and polar bears hybridizing in the wild today tells us how the ABC Islands bears came to be: they are the descendants of many male brown bear immigrants and some female polar bears from long ago," Stirling said.

The findings suggest that continued climate warming and loss of arctic sea ice may lead to the same thing happening more broadly, said coauthor Richard E. (Ed) Green, an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering in UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering. "As the ice melts in the Arctic, what is going to happen to the polar bears? In the ABC Islands, the polar bears are gone. They're brown bears now, but with polar bear genes still present in their genomes," he said.

The first genetic studies of ABC Islands brown bears looked at their mitochondrial DNA, which is separate from the chromosomes and is inherited only through the female lineage. The mitochondrial DNA of ABC Islands brown bears matches that of polar bears more closely than that of other brown bears, which led some scientists to think that the ABC Islands brown bears gave rise to modern polar bears.

The new study looks at the "nuclear DNA" carried on the chromosomes in the cell nucleus. It is the latest in a series of genetic studies of polar bears published in recent years, each of which has prompted new ideas about the relationship between polar bears and brown bears. A 2010 study of fossils and mitochondrial DNA supported the idea that polar bears evolved from the ABC Islands brown bears. But a 2011 study of mitochondrial DNA from extinct Irish brown bears showed an even closer match to polar bears and suggested that polar bears got their mitochondrial DNA from hybridization with Irish bears. Shapiro, a coauthor of that study, said she now thinks the Irish brown bears may be another example of what happened in the ABC Islands, but she can't say for sure until she studies their nuclear DNA.

"In retrospect, I think we were wrong about the directionality of the gene flow between polar bears and Irish brown bears," she said.

Two studies published in 2012 sought to determine when the polar bear lineage diverged from the brown bear lineage using nuclear DNA data. The first, published in April in Science, put the split at 600,000 years ago and concluded that polar bears carry brown bear mitochondrial DNA due to past hybridizations. The second, published in July in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggested that brown bears, black bears, and polar bears diverged around 4 to 5 million years ago, followed by repeated episodes of hybridization between polar bears and brown bears.

The new study does not address the question of how long ago polar bears diverged from brown bears, but it may help sort out the conflicting results of recent studies. "It's a good step in the right direction of understanding what really happened," Shapiro said.

The study does indicate that the divergence of polar bears from brown bears was only half as long ago as the split between the brown bear and black bear lineages, said Cahill. "We can tell how long brown bears and polar bears have been separate species as a proportion of how long ago they separated from more distantly related species, but putting a year on it is very difficult," he said.

Green noted that efforts to understand the relationship between polar bears and brown bears has been complicated by the unusual case of the ABC Islands brown bears. "It's as if you were studying the relationship between humans and chimpanzees and your analysis included DNA from some weird population of humans that had hybridized with chimps. You would get very strange results until you figured that out," he said.

In addition to Cahill, Green, Shapiro, and Stirling, the coauthors of the new paper include postdoctoral researchers Tara Fulton and Mathias Stiller, undergraduate Rauf Salamzade, and graduate student John St. John at UC Santa Cruz; Flora Jay and Montgomery Slatkin at UC Berkeley; and Nikita Ovsyanikov at the Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve in Russia. Green and Shapiro direct the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab. This research was funded by the Searle Scholars Program.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California, Santa Cruz.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Cahill JA, Green RE, Fulton TL, Stiller M, Jay F, et al. Genomic Evidence for Island Population Conversion Resolves Conflicting Theories of Polar Bear Evolution. PLoS Genet, 9(3): e1003345; 2013 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1003345

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/BI_Wv58a2UU/130314175654.htm

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Daily Kos: Republican senators have added riders to a finance bill ...

GOP amendments ensure that pre-1899 firearms,
are not controlled the way other firearms
?are, even though they may operate the same
as modern firearms.

With several pieces of gun-safety legislation headed for the Senate floor, Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee have added gun-rights amendments to a finance bill designed to keep the government going until the end of 2013:

The provisions, which have been renewed separately at various points, would prohibit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from requiring gun dealers to conduct annual inventories to ensure that they have not lost guns or had them stolen, and would retain a broad definition of ?antique? guns that can be imported into the United States outside of normal regulations.

Another amendment would prevent the A.T.F. from refusing to renew a dealer?s license for lack of business; many licensed dealers who are not actively engaged in selling firearms can now obtain a license to sell guns and often fly under the radar of the agency and other law enforcement officials, which gun control advocates argue leads to a freer flow of illegal guns.

A final measure would require the agency to attach a disclaimer to data about guns to indicate that it ?cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about fire-arms-related crimes.?

If these amendments sound like the opposite of what should be done to reduce gun violence, they are. What precisely is to be gained by not requiring a gun dealer to check to see if weapons have been stolen, perhaps by store employees and sold privately to people prohibited from owning firearms? Like violent felons or individuals with serious mental illnesses that make it too dangerous for them to own guns. And what purpose is served by a provision that requires the ATF to ignore evidence that, say, a certain kind of firearm or certain region of the nation is conducive to more gun-related crimes?

The backers of these amendments obviously expect Americans to forget why gun-control measures have emerged as priorities after being mostly dormant for more than a decade.

Originally posted to Meteor Blades on Wed Mar 13, 2013 at 01:28 PM PDT.

Also republished by Shut Down the NRA and Daily Kos.

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Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/13/1193840/-Republican-senators-have-added-riders-to-a-finance-bill-that-make-gun-control-more-difficult

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Obama makes little headway with Republicans over deficit

By David Lawder and Rachelle Younglai

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama met on Wednesday with his toughest critics in Washington - House of Representatives Republicans - and made little headway in convincing them to accept his demand for tax increases as part of a deficit-reduction deal.

"If the president wants to let our unwillingness to raise taxes get in the way, then we're not going to be able to set differences aside and focus on what we agree on," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, told reporters shortly after the meeting in the basement of the Capitol.

Earlier in the day, Obama also tamped down expectations for a major deal soon to shrink the deficit.

"Ultimately, it may be that the differences are just too wide," the Democratic president told ABC television.

House Speaker John Boehner, the top elected Republican in the United States, agreed that wide differences remain, even after Obama's strong re-election victory last November.

Boehner did not restrain his criticism following Wednesday's meeting, telling reporters: "Republicans want to balance the budget. The president doesn't. Republicans want to solve our long-term debt problem. The president doesn't. We want to unlock our energy resources to put more Americans back to work. The president doesn't."

Nonetheless, Obama and Republicans in Congress have left the door open to continuing to search for ways to shave hundreds of billions of dollars, or even trillions, from long-term deficits.

A White House official, who asked not to be identified, said Obama told Republicans that since he no longer needs to seek re-election, he is able to focus more freely on what he can get done on issues ranging from the budget to gun violence, immigration reform and cyber security.

Several Republicans left their meeting with Obama telling reporters that the president said he was willing to wring budget savings out of "entitlement" programs, which include Medicare and Medicaid healthcare for the elderly, disabled and poor.

While that would be a significant step toward Republicans, if Obama followed through, House Republicans were apparently unwilling to make any steps toward Obama on tax increases. They have argued that Democrats won more than $600 billion in tax hikes on the rich at the beginning of this year. That, coupled with new taxes related to Obama's healthcare law, are enough, they argue.

Republicans took control of the House in 2011, two years after Obama became president, and have been a thorn in his side ever since.

Conservative House Republicans, many of them Tea Party activists, at various points have pushed for government shutdowns and a first-ever default on U.S. debt in their drive to get Obama to agree to significantly shrink the size of the federal government and budget deficits.

Despite their contentious relations, a smiling Obama left the 90-minute, closed-door meeting with House Republicans telling reporters, "I enjoyed it. It was useful."

But there were no pictures of Obama and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner walking together, as Boehner trailed the president when the two exited.

COMPETING VISIONS

But as the House Budget Committee worked to approve Chairman Paul Ryan's 10-year budget plan later in the night, Republicans kept hammering Obama on his refusal to embrace that document's goal of erasing all deficits by 2023.

"It's disappointing to hear he doesn't believe we need to balance the budget within a 10-year time frame," Representative Greg Walden of Oregon told reporters.

Obama has said he is more focused on seeing a budget that helps create jobs and spurs the U.S. economy.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp said Obama did inform them that he "wanted revenue-neutral corporate tax reform. So that was a very major point." If that is the case and Obama simultaneously sticks to his goal of raising more tax revenue for deficit-reduction, the burden would likely fall more heavily on high-income earners.

Republicans also peppered Obama with questions about the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts, known as "sequestration," that went into effect March 1 and have been a months-long source of tension between Congress and the White House.

Representative Darrell Issa of California, said one fellow Republican asked Obama why "they closed down the White House (to public tours) rather than canceling the congressional Christmas party" in order to achieve some of the required savings.

As Obama visited House Republicans - he will return on Thursday to meet with House Democrats - the Senate Budget Committee, run by Democratic Senator Patty Murray, began debating its counter-proposal to the Ryan budget.

That plan would cut U.S. deficits by around $1.85 trillion over 10 years with an equal mix of spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.

Annual U.S. deficits under her plan would hover in the $400 billion-$600 billion range for much of the next decade. But Democrats argue that this would allow for stronger near-term job growth than Republicans' balanced-budget vision.

Full details of the plan released by Murray on Wednesday showed that deficits would average 2.4 percent of U.S. economic output through 2023, a level that many economists view as sustainable.

The Ryan budget would see an average deficit-to-GDP ratio of 0.6 percent. It is currently at 5.6 percent.

In recent years, agreement on a budget resolution - which is supposed to broadly set out the government's spending priorities - has been the exception rather than the rule. The last time one passed Congress was April, 2009, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House.

But Obama and some Republicans have raised hopes that this year might be different, with Obama's new outreach to Capitol Hill raising expectations.

If the full House and Senate pass their competing budget blueprints next week, which is a possibility, that could set the stage for an intensive negotiation toward a compromise over the next few months.

(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro and Mark Felsenthal; Writing by Richard Cowan; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dueling-budget-plans-debut-congress-005342080--business.html

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Catherine Giudici: Why She Won The Bachelor Summed Up in One Pic

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/03/catherine-giudici-why-she-won-the-bachelor/

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Evernote updated, adds new PDF viewer, Snippets, and more

Evernote has been updated to version 5.2, adding a slew of new features, including an improved PDF viewer, Snippets, new formatting options, and new features for Evernote Business. The new PDF viewer includes a multipage preview screen for PDFs, a rotation lock, and the ability to view two pages at once by changing your iPad?s orientation.

The iPad version can now display your notes as Snippets. First, change the note view from a grid to a list by pulling the note list down and tapping the icon in the upper right corner. Then select your desired note to open it in a panel that slides over.

The new formatting options are Simplify Formatting and Plain Text. Simplify Formatting is used to clean up formatting issues that you may encounter in a note, especially a web clip. Plain text formatting discards all rich text and images, leaving only text.

Evernote Business users will are now able to designate their business notebooks as offline, allowing their notes to load instantly without the need for an internet connection. Business users may now also view their company?s Business Library on the iPad.

The iPad version also gains the ability to view the Evernote Trunk, a curated list of apps, services and devices that connect to Evernote. Along with all of these enhancements, Evernote 5.2 contains a number of bug fixes and smaller improvements.

The update is free on the App Store.

• Free - Download Now

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/QbXD5M4S4FA/story01.htm

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West wary, Iran upbeat after nuclear talks

Stanislav Filippov / AFP - Getty Images

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili speaks at a press conference after the talks on Iran's nuclear program in the Kazakh city of Almaty on Wednesday.

By Ali Arouzi, Correspondent, NBC News

ALMATY, Kazakhstan ? Another round of talks between six world powers and Iran over Tehran?s nuclear program ended Wednesday. And like the air in fog-engulfed Almaty, the Kazakh city where the meetings were held, nothing was very clear at the conclusion of the latest negotiations.

The only thing both sides seemed able to agree on was that they would meet again: The next high-level talks will be held on April 5 and 6, again in Almaty.

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It is hard to know what exactly has been offered and rejected by Iran and the six powers ? France, Germany, the United States, China Russia and Britain ? because the negotiations are opaque by nature.

?

NBC's Ali Arouzi reports from Almaty, Kazakhstan, on the nuclear talks between Iran and six world powers, including the United States, that have ended with no tangible agreements other than to meet again in April.  

While Tehran maintains it is not seeking nuclear weapons, both sides seemed just as far away from an agreement to resolve the dispute that could lead to military conflict in the Middle East.

Israel has hinted that it could strike Iran's nuclear sites if current diplomatic efforts failed to stop its enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade. Israel is thought to be the only country in the region with a nuclear arsenal.

An American diplomat speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity said that Iran was offered minor sanctions relief if Tehran was willing to scale back certain elements of its nuclear program. It is generally accepted that neither side wants a complete breakdown in talks.

Iran?s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili was upbeat and smiling after the talks concluded, and said that the offers made by the world powers was more realist than previous ones.

"In this round of talks we have witnessed that despite all the attitudes during the last eight months, they tried to get closer to our viewpoints," he told journalists.

He also said Western powers had made no demands that Iran shut down a uranium enrichment facility in Fordow, which is hidden deep inside a mountain.

Jalili concluded by saying that Iran had made massive achievements since the last round of talks and that it would not give up its rights.

One Western diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that that halting enriching uranium to 20 percent fissile purity ? a short technical step from weapons grade ??shipping out current stockpiles and shutting Fordow was still a prerequisite for world powers.

Speaking to journalists for the six powers, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said that she was glad that the Iranians saw this as a positive meeting.

"I hope the Iranian side is looking positively on the proposal we put forward," she said.

"We have to see what happens next,? she added, striking a cautious tone.

She only took three questions from journalists, replying with very short answers.

Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, one thing that the Iranian team has to look forward to is the approaching Persian New Year.? This, the most important holiday on the calendar, is a time for shopping, buying presents for family and friends and decorations for the festive season.

The sense that a deal is on the horizon could strengthen the Iranian currency, which has been in free-fall under pressure from Western sanctions.? A strengthened rial would give ordinary Iranians more purchasing power, and the government more breathing space.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Related:

'Why Almaty?' Journalists at Iran nuclear talks wonder

Iran widens use of clandestine tanker fleet to bust oil sanctions, international officials say

Iran conducts tests to bring down 'hypothetical' drones

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/27/17118643-west-wary-iran-upbeat-after-nuclear-talks?lite

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