Foreword

European Neurological Review provides extensive reviews in the field of basic and clinical neurology, including current and future disease treatment options, with the aim of giving clinicians an overview of the main research topics as well as providing diagnostic and treatment advances in order to assist clinicians in daily practice.
The contents of this issue cover a wide spectrum of neurological diseases, starting with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which is the most common neurodegenerative disorder. AD represents a critical worldwide problem related to growing life expectancy and to the frequently needed human and monetary resources to improve the care of patients through the optimisation of diagnostic and therapeutic targets. An emerging topic in AD is the revision of diagnostic criteria, which strongly suggest the use of biological (cerebrospinal fluid [CSF]) and topographical markers (positron emission tomography [PET]) to improve diagnostic sensitivity and specificity. In this issue, an interesting overview of recent advances and perspectives in the field of molecular imaging in AD is provided as an update, together with a review on the role of primary care physicians in AD.
Two articles are dedicated to multiple sclerosis (MS). A point of debate in MS from theoretical and practical points of view is represented by the poor reliability of the principal outcome measures used to establish the clinical course of the disease and to test whether patients respond to treatment. In this issue there are two articles dealing with this problem: the first is focused on measuring disability progression with the MS Functional Composite, an integrative scale that can be added to routine neurological examination and to the currently used Extended Disability Status Scale (EDSS) to obtain a more informative patient profile; the second summarises the indications on the use of interferon beta-1β as a disease-modifying drug.
Several other neurological diseases are discussed in this issue, including guidelines for diagnosis and treatment approaches that can be used in the context of emergency neurology, with a particular focus on brain trauma. Suggestions for the therapy of tension-type headache based on the European Federation of Neurological Societies (EFNS) guidelines, which are potentially useful to both neurologists and general practitioners, are also given.
In addition, current and future therapeutic options for a quite rare but important as potentially treatable neuroperipheral disease, inflammatory polyradiculoneuropathy, are reviewed. Finally, elite fields such as drug-resistant epilepsy and paediatric neurometabolic diseases are not neglected, in order to be of help for clinical neurologists in daily practice.
European Neurological Review would like to thank everyone involved in this edition, especially the contributing authors for providing such insightful discussion. We are certain that this diverse selection of instructive and informative review articles will be of great interest and benefit to you, the reader. n