About the Authors

Refik Pul

Contributed equally to this work with: Refik Pul, Franco Morbiducci

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Franco Morbiducci

Contributed equally to this work with: Refik Pul, Franco Morbiducci

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Jelena Škuljec

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Thomas Skripuletz

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Vikramjeet Singh

Affiliations Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany, Center for Systems Neuroscience, Hannover, Germany

Ute Diederichs

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Niklas Garde

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Elke Verena Voss

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Corinna Trebst

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Martin Stangel

Stangel.Martin@MH-Hannover.de

Affiliations Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany, Center for Systems Neuroscience, Hannover, Germany

Competing Interests

RP declares that he has received travel funds from Baxter, Bayer HealthCare, Biogen, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, and Merck Serono in the last six years. TS declares that he has received travel funds from Novartis, Merck, and Bayer Healthcare. NG, FM and JS declare that they have no competing interests. CT has received honoraria for consultation and expert testimony as well as travel grants from Bayer Health Care, Biogen Idec, Diamed Medizintechnik GmbH, Fresenius Medical Care, Merck Serono, Novartis, Sanofi-Avnetis, Talecris Biotherapeutics GmbH, and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries. MS has received honoraria for scientific lectures and/or travel funds from Baxter, Bayer Healthcare, Biogen Idec, CSL Behring, Merck-Serono, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, Talecris, and Teva. EVV declares that she received travel funds from Novartis and speakers honoraria from Biogen idec in the last six years. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: RP MS. Performed the experiments: RP FM JS UD VS NG EVV. Analyzed the data: RP FM JS TS NG EVV CT MS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: RP MS. Wrote the paper: RP FM TS CT MS.