Welcome to the fall edition of US Neurology. This edition features a diverse range of topical articles covering many therapeutic areas relevant to neurologists and other practitioners involved in the care of patients with neurological illness. We begin with an expert interview with Ruben Kuzniecky on the subject of the Human Epilepsy Project, which aims to enhance our understanding of epilepsy with focal seizures.
Modern healthcare systems face numerous challenges in terms of racial, gender, and ethnic disparities. This issue contains my special report on the American Parkinson Disease Association’s Diversity in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) Research Conference, which explored the experiences of people with PD from minority communities in the USA, as well as discussed disparities in PD care. Also on the subject of PD, Son et al. review the non-motor symptoms of PD, including atypical seizures, which tend to be under-recognized.
We also feature two review articles on the subject of migraine, which has seen a number of recent therapeutic advances. Deborah Friedman discusses the currently available preventative medications, the factors affecting their selection, and proposes a rational prescribing strategy. In addition, Valentina Popova and Thomas Berk discuss the challenges of managing pediatric migraine.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is considered to be an immune-mediated disease with a number of causal risk factors that are both genetic and environmental. In a review article, Kasper et al. consider the role of the gut microbiota in the pathogenesis of MS.
Case reports are an important addition to medical journals as they can raise awareness of rare disease presentations. Cooper, Darki and Beydoun present two case reports of patients with spinal muscular atrophy who are compound heterozygotes – with one deletion of SMN1 and a subtle mutation of SMN1 on the other chromosome.
Finally, we feature a supplement that describes the proceedings of an Industry Therapeutic Update held at the 2018 Annual American Academy of Neurology (AAN) meeting. This update discussed the use of subcutaneous immunoglobulin, a potential alternative to intravenous immunoglobulin in the treatment of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy.
US Neurology would like to thank all of the expert authors for providing us with insightful and thought-provoking articles. We are also grateful to all organisations and media partners for their ongoing support and the members of our Editorial Board for their continued involvement and advice. We hope that you will find plenty of interest within this issue. 
