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Therapy to halt or slow down the progression of neurodegeneration in Parkinson's disease (PD) is urgently demand. Disease modification therapy can modify the natural history of the disease and show neuroprotective effect in PD. Currently, many potential neuroprotective therapies are emerging. The review aims to summarize the new advances for disease modification therapies in PD including targeting drugs α-synuclein, LRRK2 gene, GBA gene, mitochondrial function, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), neuroinflammation, calcium antagonist and iron chelating agent.

With the rapid advancement of technology, integration of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been widely used in recent English as a foreign language teaching and learning. Despite the prevalence of online CMC discussions, previous studies have not drawn conclusive results, and empirical evidence on how online discussions affect student reading comprehension is limited. Thus, the purpose of this study was to conduct a quasi-experimental research to investigate how asynchronous and synchronous discussions influenced the reading comprehension of 50 university students in a Taiwanese collaborative learning context. A quasi-experimental design was conducted with multiple observations before and after the intervention. Research instruments included reading comprehension tests, a questionnaire survey, and a semi-structured interview. Major findings suggested that most of the participants used the synchronous discussion mode more frequently than the asynchronous mode when performing online reading tasks. Nevertheless, with increased asynchronous discussions, students' reading comprehension scores and satisfaction increased as well. Although the learners generally accepted both online discussion modes, the interview results revealed several drawbacks as well as advantages of the online discussion environments. Limitations of the study and implications for instructional pedagogy and future research were presented and discussed.

Previous studies have been done to research the effects of different electronic feedback (e-feedback) modes of helping English as a foreign language (EFL) students improve their writing. The purpose of this study was to employ online peer feedback (OPF) and automated corrective feedback (ACF) to assess EFL learners' writing performance in the areas of sentence complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical density. Our major findings suggest that OPF is potentially more useful than ACF in improving sentence writing, making fewer grammatical errors, and producing more types of lexical items. Nevertheless, we also found that the majority of students favored the use of ACF for the purpose of producing a richer vocabulary. Less skilled writers tended to make greater improvements than higher-skilled writers in producing more sentences and lexical items after OPF use; however, the difference was not statistically significant. Based on our research results, we discuss and present the implications of these findings for pedagogical instruction and future research.

Considering that I GBA i , I TMEM175 i , and I SNCA i are risk genes for both LBD and PD, it is noteworthy to investigate whether I BIN1 i and I APOE i are also associated with the risk of PD. Keywords: APOE; BIN1; Parkinson's disease; rare variant EN APOE BIN1 Parkinson's disease rare variant 698 701 4 04/15/22 20220501 NES 220501 Abbreviations GWAS genome-wide association study LBD Lewy body dementia PD Parkinson's disease Dear Editor, Recently, Chia et al. identified five risk genes for Lewy body dementia (LBD) in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) [1]. Similarly, a previous study identified that the I BIN1 i variant rs13403026 was associated with later AAO in I GBA i -associated PD [4], suggesting the potential role of I BIN1 i in regulating AAO in PD. [Extracted from the article]

The neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is considered a robust prognostic biomarker for predicting patient survival outcomes in many diseases. However, it remains unclear whether it can be used as a biomarker for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). To correlate NLR with disease progression and survival in sporadic ALS, 1030 patients with ALS between January 2012 and December 2018 were included in this study. These patients were assigned into three groups according to their NLR values: Group 1 (NLR < 2, n = 544 [52.8%]), Group 2 (NLR = 2-3, n = 314 [30.5%]), and Group 3 (NLR > 3, n = 172 [16.7%]). All patients were followed up until April 2020. Patients in Group 3 had a significantly older onset age, a lower score on the Revised ALS Functional Rating Scale, and rapidly progressing disease conditions. Furthermore, faster disease progression rates were associated with higher NLR values (odds ratio = 1.211, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.090-1.346, P < 0.001) after adjusting for other risk factors. Compared with Groups 1 and 2, the survival time in Group 3 was significantly shorter (log-rank P = 0.002). The NLR value was considered an independent parameter for the prediction of survival in ALS patients after normalizing for all other potential parameters (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.079, 95% CI: 1.016-1.146, P = 0.014). The effects on ALS survival remained significant when adjusted for treatment (HR = 1.074, 95% CI: 1.012-1.141, P trend = 0.019) or when considering the stratified NLR value (HR = 1.115, 95% CI: 1.009-1.232, P trend = 0.033). Thus, the NLR may help to predict the rate of disease progression and survival in patients with sporadic ALS. The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, China (approval No. 2015 (236)) on December 23, 2015., Competing Interests: None