SummaryA total of 72 patients with biopsy proven celiac disease (CD) (mean age 51, SD 15 yrs.) were screened for neurological disorders. Only 15.4 % of patients did not show any evidence for neurological disease. Medical history revealed a high prevalence of neurological disorders such as migraine (27.8 %), carpal tunnel syndrome (19.4 %), vestibular neuritis (8.3 %), seizures (5.6 %) and myelitis (2.8 %). Interestingly, 34.7 % of CD patients complained of psychiatric problems such as depression, personality changes or even psychosis. The physical examination yielded stance and gait problems in more than one third of the patients, while limb ataxia, intention tremor, and dysarthria were rather uncommon. Other motor features such as basal ganglia symptoms, pyramidal tract signs, tics and myoclonus were infrequent.34.7 % of CD patients showed deep sensory loss with reduced ankle reflexes in 13.9 %.Interestingly, vestibular deficits were present in 12.5 % of patients. So, gait disturbances in CD cannot only result from cerebellar ataxia, but also from proprioceptive or vestibular impairment. Abbreviations

Sporadic late-onset cerebellar ataxia of unknown cause is considered a neurodegenerative disorder whose underlying mechanisms are still unknown. To identify antineuronal autoantibodies, immunohistochemical and immunoblotting techniques were performed in 67 patients with sporadic cerebellar degeneration of unknown cause. Elevated P/Q-type voltage-gated calcium channel (VGCC)-specific antibodies were found in eight patients (11.9%). There was no hint of a paraneoplastic disorder in any of the patients. The present findings suggest an autoimmune contribution to the pathophysiology of a subgroup of sporadic late-onset cerebellar ataxia.

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Microfluidic systems fabricated in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) enable a broad variety of applications and are widespread in the field of Lab-on-a-Chip. Here we demonstrate semi-contact-writing, a novel method for fabrication of polymer based molds for casting microfluidic PDMS chips in a highly flexible, time and cost-efficient manner. The method is related to direct-writing of an aqueous polymer solution on a planar glass substrate and substitutes conventional, time- and cost-consuming UV-lithography. This technique facilitates on-demand prototyping in a low-cost manner and is therefore ideally suited for rapid chip layout iterations. No cleanroom facilities and less expertise are required. Fabrication time from scratch to ready-to-use PDMS-chip is less than 5 h. This polymer writing method enables structure widths down to 140 μm and controllable structure heights ranging from 5.5 μm for writing single layers up to 98 μm by stacking. As a unique property, freely selectable height variations across a substrate can be achieved by application of local stacking. Furthermore, the molds exhibit low surface roughness (Ra  =  24 nm, RRMS  =  28 nm) and high fidelity edge sharpness. We validated the method by fabrication of molds to cast PDMS chips for droplet based flow-through PCR with single-cell sensitivity.