anchor_id stringlengths 8 8 | anchor_title stringlengths 22 248 | anchor_abstract stringlengths 73 4.05k | positive_pool listlengths 1 1 | negative_pool listlengths 1 1 |
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22509163 | Targets for a comparative neurobiology of language. | One longstanding impediment to progress in understanding the neural basis of language is the development of model systems that retain language-relevant cognitive behaviors yet permit invasive cellular neuroscience methods. Recent experiments in songbirds suggest that this group may be developed into a powerful animal model, particularly for components of grammatical processing. It remains unknown, however, what a neuroscience of language perception may look like when instantiated at the cellular or network level. Here we deconstruct language perception into a minimal set of cognitive processes necessary to support grammatical processing. We then review the current state of our understanding about the neural mechanisms of these requisite cognitive processes in songbirds. We note where current knowledge is lacking, and suggest how these mechanisms may ultimately combine to support an emergent mechanism capable of processing grammatical structures of differing complexity.</AbstractText | [
[
"10378865",
"Neurokinin type-1 receptor antagonist inhibits enhancement of T cell functions by substance P in normal and neuromanipulated capsaicin-treated rats.",
"Substance P (SP) plays a major role in the regulation of the interaction between immune and nervous systems. SP administration stimulates... | [
[
"23264884",
"Neurogenetics and Epigenetics in Impulsive Behaviour: Impact on Reward Circuitry.",
"Adverse, unfavourable life conditions, particularly during early life stages and infancy, can lead to epigenetic regulation of genes involved in stress-response, behavioral disinhibition, and cognitive-em... |
23195310 | Model organism databases in behavioral neuroscience. | Model Organism Databases (MODs) are an important informatics tool for researchers. They provide comprehensive organism specific genetic, genomic, and phenotype datasets. MODs ensure accurate data identification and integrity and provide official nomenclature for genes, Quantitative Trait Loci, and strains. Most importantly, the MODs provide professionally curated data drawn from the literature for function, phenotype and disease associations, and pathway involvement. These data, along with nomenclature and data identity, are incorporated into larger scale genomic databases and research publications. MODs also offer a number of software tools that allow researchers to access, display, and analyze data from reports to genome browsers.</AbstractText | [
[
"19254758",
"Re-exposure to endotoxin induces differential cytokine gene expression in the rat hypothalamus and spleen.",
"This study was designed to investigate whether the pattern of hypothalamic and splenic cytokine expression induced by peripheral administration of a bacterial lipopolysaccharide (... | [
[
"23181017",
"Support vector machines for spike pattern classification with a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron.",
"Spike pattern classification is a key topic in machine learning, computational neuroscience, and electronic device design. Here, we offer a new supervised learning rule based on Support Vec... |
23372986 | Experience with multimodality telepathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. | Several modes of telepathology exist including static (store-and-forward), dynamic (live video streaming or robotic microscopy), and hybrid technology involving whole slide imaging (WSI). Telepathology has been employed at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) for over a decade at local, national, and international sites. All modes of telepathology have been successfully utilized to exploit our institutions subspecialty expertise and to compete for pathology services. This article discusses the experience garnered at UPMC with each of these teleconsultation methods. Static and WSI telepathology systems have been utilized for many years in transplant pathology using a private network and client-server architecture. Only minor clinically significant differences of opinion were documented. In hematopathology, the CellaVision(®) system is used to transmit, via email, static images of blood cells in peripheral blood smears for remote interpretation. While live video streaming has remained the mode of choice for providing immediate adequacy assessment of cytology specimens by telecytology, other methods such as robotic microscopy have been validated and shown to be effective. Robotic telepathology has been extensively used to remotely interpret intra-operative neuropathology consultations (frozen sections). Adoption of newer technology and increased pathologist experience has improved accuracy and deferral rates in teleneuropathology. A digital pathology consultation portal (https://pathconsult.upmc.com/) was recently created at our institution to facilitate digital pathology second opinion consults, especially for WSI. The success of this web-based tool is the ability to handle vendor agnostic, large image files of digitized slides, and ongoing user-friendly customization for clients and teleconsultants. It is evident that the practice of telepathology at our institution has evolved in concert with advances in technology and user experience. Early and continued adoption of telepathology has promoted additional digital pathology resources that are now being leveraged for other clinical, educational, and research purposes.</AbstractText | [
[
"3974835",
"Bilateral traumatic abducens nerve palsy without skull fracture and with cervical spine fracture: case report and review of the literature.",
"Bilateral traumatic abducens nerve palsy is a rare condition. Here a case without skull fracture and associated with cervical spine fracture is rep... | [
[
"23193602",
"Arthropod venoms: a vast arsenal of insecticidal neuropeptides.",
"Arthropods are the most diverse animal group on the planet, and occupy almost all ecological niches. Venomous arthropods are a rich source of bioactive compounds evolved for prey capture and defense against predators and/o... |
23060761 | A computational approach to "free will" constrained by the games we play. | Human choice is not free-we are bounded by a multitude of biological constraints. Yet, within the various landscapes we face, we do express choice, preference, and varying degrees of so-called willful behavior. Moreover, it appears that the capacity for choice in humans is variable. Empirical studies aimed at investigating the experience of "free will" will benefit from theoretical disciplines that constrain the language used to frame the relevant issues. The combination of game theory and computational reinforcement learning theory with empirical methods is already beginning to provide valuable insight into the biological variables underlying capacity for choice in humans and how things may go awry in individuals with brain disorders. These disciplines operate within abstract quantitative landscapes, but have successfully been applied to investigate strategic and adaptive human choice guided by formal notions of optimal behavior. Psychiatric illness is an extreme, but interesting arena for studying human capacity for choice. The experiences and behaviors of patients suggest these individuals fundamentally suffer from a diminished capacity of willful choice. Herein, I will briefly discuss recent applications of computationally guided approaches to human choice behavior and the underlying neurobiology. These approaches can be integrated into empirical investigation at multiple temporal scales of analysis including the growing body of experiments in human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and newly emerging sub-second electrochemical and electrophysiological measurements in the human brain. These cross-disciplinary approaches hold promise for revealing the underlying neurobiological mechanisms for the variety of choice capacity in humans.</AbstractText | [
[
"19400719",
"The science of neural interface systems.",
"The ultimate goal of neural interface research is to create links between the nervous system and the outside world either by stimulating or by recording from neural tissue to treat or assist people with sensory, motor, or other disabilities of n... | [
[
"24294562",
"Dorello's Canal and Gruber's Ligament: Historical Perspective.",
"Wenzel Leopold Gruber and Primo Dorello were great anatomists and researchers during the 19th and 20th centuries. Their contributions to neuroanatomy-namely the Gruber's (petrosphenoidal) ligament and Dorello's canal, respe... |
23035093 | Optimization of a GCaMP calcium indicator for neural activity imaging. | Genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs) are powerful tools for systems neuroscience. Recent efforts in protein engineering have significantly increased the performance of GECIs. The state-of-the art single-wavelength GECI, GCaMP3, has been deployed in a number of model organisms and can reliably detect three or more action potentials in short bursts in several systems in vivo. Through protein structure determination, targeted mutagenesis, high-throughput screening, and a battery of in vitro assays, we have increased the dynamic range of GCaMP3 by severalfold, creating a family of "GCaMP5" sensors. We tested GCaMP5s in several systems: cultured neurons and astrocytes, mouse retina, and in vivo in Caenorhabditis chemosensory neurons, Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction and adult antennal lobe, zebrafish retina and tectum, and mouse visual cortex. Signal-to-noise ratio was improved by at least 2- to 3-fold. In the visual cortex, two GCaMP5 variants detected twice as many visual stimulus-responsive cells as GCaMP3. By combining in vivo imaging with electrophysiology we show that GCaMP5 fluorescence provides a more reliable measure of neuronal activity than its predecessor GCaMP3. GCaMP5 allows more sensitive detection of neural activity in vivo and may find widespread applications for cellular imaging in general.</AbstractText | [
[
"19064491",
"Retention of high tactile acuity throughout the life span in blindness.",
"Previous studies of tactile acuity on the fingertip, using passive touch, have demonstrated an age-related decline in spatial resolution for both sighted and blind subjects. We have reexamined this age dependence w... | [
[
"23033443",
"Apraxia of speech: concepts and controversies.",
"This article was written as an editorial to a collection of original articles on apraxia of speech (AOS) in which some of the more recent advancements in the understanding of this syndrome are discussed. It covers controversial issues conc... |
23055482 | Towards a new neurobiology of language. | Theoretical advances in language research and the availability of increasingly high-resolution experimental techniques in the cognitive neurosciences are profoundly changing how we investigate and conceive of the neural basis of speech and language processing. Recent work closely aligns language research with issues at the core of systems neuroscience, ranging from neurophysiological and neuroanatomic characterizations to questions about neural coding. Here we highlight, across different aspects of language processing (perception, production, sign language, meaning construction), new insights and approaches to the neurobiology of language, aiming to describe promising new areas of investigation in which the neurosciences intersect with linguistic research more closely than before. This paper summarizes in brief some of the issues that constitute the background for talks presented in a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. It is not a comprehensive review of any of the issues that are discussed in the symposium.</AbstractText | [
[
"21748284",
"A failure to normalize biochemical and metabolic insults during morphine withdrawal disrupts synaptic repair in mice transgenic for HIV-gp120.",
"Drug abuse in HIV-infected individuals accelerates the onset and progression of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND). Opiates are a c... | [
[
"23195316",
"Opportunities for bioinformatics in the classification of behavior and psychiatric disorders.",
"A bioinformatics approach to behavioral neuroscience provides both unique opportunities and challenges for research on behavior. A major challenge has been to describe, define, and discriminat... |
23505339 | Baby Steps to Superintelligence: Neuroprosthetics and Children. | Children surviving neural injuries face challenges not seen by their adult counterparts, namely that they experience neural injury before reaching neurodevelopmental maturity. Neural prostheses offer one possible path to recovery, along with the potential for functional outcomes that could exceed expectations. Although the first cochlear implant was placed more than fifty years ago, the field of neuroprosthetics is still relatively young. Several types of neural prostheses are in development stages ranging from animal models to (adult) human trials. In this paper, I discuss how neural prostheses may assist recovery for children surviving neural injury. I argue that approaching the use of neural prosthetics in children with considerations derived from transhumanism alongside traditional bioethics can provide an opportunity to reframe adult-focused ethics toward a child/family focus and to strip away the prejudicial metaphor of cyborgization.</AbstractText | [
[
"12951145",
"Structure and function of the vomeronasal system: an update.",
"Several developments during the past 15 years have profoundly affected our understanding of the vomeronasal system (VNS) of vertebrates. In the mid 1990s, the vomeronasal epithelium of mammals was found to contain two populat... | [
[
"22850833",
"Complex biomedical systems: from basic science to translation.",
"The Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) of the University of Southern California (BME@USC) has a longstanding tradition of advancing biomedicine through the development and application of novel engineering ideas. Mor... |
23176028 | Iranians' contribution to world literature on neuroscience. | The purpose of this study is to analyse Iranian scientific publications in the neuroscience subfields by librarians and neuroscientists, using Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) via Web of Science data over the period, 2002-2008.</AbstractText Data were retrieved from the SCIE. Data were collected from the 'subject area' of the database and classified by neuroscience experts into 14 subfields. To identify the citation patterns, we applied the 'impact factor' and the 'number of publication'. Data were also analysed using HISTCITE, Excel 2007 and SPSS.</AbstractText Seven hundred and thirty-four papers have been published by Iranian between 2002 and 2008. Findings showed a growing trend of neuroscience papers in the last 3 years with most papers (264) classified in the neuropharmacology subfield. There were fewer papers in neurohistory, psychopharmacology and artificial intelligence. International contributions of authors were mostly in the neurology subfield, and 'Collaboration Coefficient' for the neuroscience subfields in Iran was 0.686 which is acceptable. Most international collaboration between Iranians and developed countries was from USA. Eighty-seven percent of the published papers were in journals with the impact factor between 0 and 4; 25% of papers were published by the researchers affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences.</AbstractText Progress of neuroscience in Iran is mostly seen in the neuropharmacology and the neurology subfields. Other subfields should also be considered as a research priority by health policymakers. As this study was carried out by the collaboration of librarians and neuroscientists, it has been proved valuable for both librarians and policymakers. This study may be encouraging for librarians from other developing countries.</AbstractText | [
[
"21312401",
"Functional brain imaging in schizophrenia: selected results and methods.",
"Functional brain imaging studies of patients with schizophrenia may be grouped into those that assume that the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia are due to disordered circuitry within a critical brain region and... | [
[
"22963524",
"Non-genomic action of beclomethasone dipropionate on bronchoconstriction caused by leukotriene C4 in precision cut lung slices in the horse.",
"Glucocorticoids have been proven to be effective in the therapy of recurrent airway obstruction (RAO) in horses via systemic as well as local (in... |
23174433 | When do people cooperate? The neuroeconomics of prosocial decision making. | Understanding the roots of prosocial behavior is an interdisciplinary research endeavor that has generated an abundance of empirical data across many disciplines. This review integrates research findings from different fields into a novel theoretical framework that can account for when prosocial behavior is likely to occur. Specifically, we propose that the motivation to cooperate (or not), generated by the reward system in the brain (extending from the striatum to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), is modulated by two neural networks: a cognitive control system (centered on the lateral prefrontal cortex) that processes extrinsic cooperative incentives, and/or a social cognition system (including the temporo-parietal junction, the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala) that processes trust and/or threat signals. The independent modulatory influence of incentives and trust on the decision to cooperate is substantiated by a growing body of neuroimaging data and reconciles the apparent paradox between economic versus social rationality in the literature, suggesting that we are in fact wired for both. Furthermore, the theoretical framework can account for substantial behavioral heterogeneity in prosocial behavior. Based on the existing data, we postulate that self-regarding individuals (who are more likely to adopt an economically rational strategy) are more responsive to extrinsic cooperative incentives and therefore rely relatively more on cognitive control to make (un)cooperative decisions, whereas other-regarding individuals (who are more likely to adopt a socially rational strategy) are more sensitive to trust signals to avoid betrayal and recruit relatively more brain activity in the social cognition system. Several additional hypotheses with respect to the neural roots of social preferences are derived from the model and suggested for future research.</AbstractText | [
[
"12716950",
"Hierarchical processing in spoken language comprehension.",
"Understanding spoken language requires a complex series of processing stages to translate speech sounds into meaning. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the brain regions that are involved in ... | [
[
"23001148",
"An observational study of the effectiveness and safety of growth hormone (Humatrope(®)) treatment in Japanese children with growth hormone deficiency or Turner syndrome.",
"This study assessed the effectiveness and safety of growth hormone (GH; Humatrope(®)) therapy in Japanese child... |
22240730 | Birdsong neurolinguistics: songbird context-free grammar claim is premature. | There are remarkable behavioral, neural, and genetic similarities between song learning in songbirds and speech acquisition in human infants. Previously, we have argued that this parallel cannot be extended to the level of sentence syntax. Although birdsong can indeed have a complex structure, it lacks the combinatorial complexity of human language syntax. Recently, this conclusion has been challenged by a report purporting to show that songbirds can learn so-called context-free syntactic rules and then use them to discriminate particular syllable patterns. Here, we demonstrate that the design of this study is inadequate to draw such a conclusion, and offer alternative explanations for the experimental results that do not require the acquisition and use of context-free grammar rules or a grammar of any kind, only the simpler hypothesis of acoustic similarity matching. We conclude that the evolution of vocal learning involves both neural homologies and behavioral convergence, and that human language reflects a unique cognitive capacity.</AbstractText | [
[
"19400719",
"The science of neural interface systems.",
"The ultimate goal of neural interface research is to create links between the nervous system and the outside world either by stimulating or by recording from neural tissue to treat or assist people with sensory, motor, or other disabilities of n... | [
[
"23351052",
"On the neural basis of rule-guided behavior.",
"Human behavior emerges from a complex dynamic interaction between graded and context-sensitive neural processes, the biomechanics of our bodies, and the vicissitudes of our environments. These coupled processes bear little resemblance to the... |
21645998 | Are we studying and treating schizophrenia correctly? | New findings are rapidly revealing an increasingly detailed image of neural- and molecular-level dysfunction in schizophrenia, distributed throughout interconnected cortico-striato-pallido-thalamic circuitry. Some disturbances appear to reflect failures of early brain maturation, that become codified into dysfunctional circuit properties, resulting in a substantial loss of, or failure to develop, both cells and/or appropriate connectivity across widely dispersed brain regions. These circuit disturbances are variable across individuals with schizophrenia, perhaps reflecting the interaction of multiple different risk genes and epigenetic events. Given these complex and variable hard-wired circuit disturbances, it is worth considering how new and emerging findings can be integrated into actionable treatment models. This paper suggests that future efforts towards developing more effective therapeutic approaches for the schizophrenias should diverge from prevailing models in genetics and molecular neuroscience, and focus instead on a more practical three-part treatment strategy: 1) systematic rehabilitative psychotherapies designed to engage healthy neural systems to compensate for and replace dysfunctional higher circuit elements, used in concert with 2) medications that specifically target cognitive mechanisms engaged by these rehabilitative psychotherapies, and 3) antipsychotic medications that target nodal or convergent circuit points within the limbic-motor interface, to constrain the scope and severity of psychotic exacerbations and thereby facilitate engagement in cognitive rehabilitation. The use of targeted cognitive rehabilitative psychotherapy plus synergistic medication has both common sense and time-tested efficacy with numerous other neuropsychiatric disorders.</AbstractText | [
[
"15996748",
"Correlates of trait impulsiveness in performance measures and neuropsychological tests.",
"Performance measures of impulsiveness offer great promise for assessing this trait in clinical and experimental studies. However, little is known about their relative superiority or inferiority to s... | [
[
"21625624",
"\"Studying injured minds\" - the Vietnam head injury study and 40 years of brain injury research.",
"The study of those who have sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBI) during military conflicts has greatly facilitated research in the fields of neuropsychology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, ... |
23062307 | Childhood adversity and DNA methylation of genes involved in the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and immune system: whole-genome and candidate-gene associations. | In recent years, translational research involving humans and animals has uncovered biological and physiological pathways that explain associations between early adverse circumstances and long-term mental and physical health outcomes. In this article, we summarize the human and animal literature demonstrating that epigenetic alterations in key biological systems, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and immune system, may underlie such disparities. We review evidence suggesting that changes in DNA methylation profiles of the genome may be responsible for the alterations in hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and immune system trajectories. Using some preliminary data, we demonstrate how explorations of genome-wide and candidate-gene DNA methylation profiles may inform hypotheses and guide future research efforts in these areas. We conclude our article by discussing the many important future directions, merging perspectives from developmental psychology, molecular genetics, neuroendocrinology, and immunology, that are essential for furthering our understanding of how early adverse circumstances may shape developmental trajectories, particularly in the areas of stress reactivity and physical or mental health.</AbstractText | [
[
"15831717",
"Resting microglial cells are highly dynamic surveillants of brain parenchyma in vivo.",
"Microglial cells represent the immune system of the mammalian brain and therefore are critically involved in various injuries and diseases. Little is known about their role in the healthy brain and th... | [
[
"23576843",
"Possibilities offered by implantable miniaturized cuff-electrodes for insect neurophysiology.",
"Recent advances in microsystems technology led to a miniaturization of cuff-electrodes, which suggests these electrodes not just for long-term neuronal recordings in mammalians, but also in me... |
23196557 | [A new neuroscientific approach using decoded neurofeedback (DecNef)]. | Neurofeedback is defined as a method to read out information from the brain and feed the information back to the brain. This technology has developed in the past ten years and attracted considerable attention as potential treatments for rehabilitation and psychiatric disease. We recently invented the decoded neurofeedback (DecNef) method, a new neurofeedback technique using functional magnetic resonance imaging. With DecNef, subjects were trained to regulate their brain activation pattern in a specific area and lead the pattern to a target state. We found that the DecNef training for several days leads to perceptual improvement that corresponds to the induced target state. DecNef enables us to test cause-and-effect relationships between neural activation in a target brain area and changes in perception, cognition, and behavior. In this sense, this method can be a powerful tool in cognitive and systems neuroscience. In addition, the concept of DecNef, leading a neural activation pattern to a specific state, can be applied for a variety of fields including engineering and medical treatment.</AbstractText | [
[
"15831717",
"Resting microglial cells are highly dynamic surveillants of brain parenchyma in vivo.",
"Microglial cells represent the immune system of the mammalian brain and therefore are critically involved in various injuries and diseases. Little is known about their role in the healthy brain and th... | [
[
"23176028",
"Iranians' contribution to world literature on neuroscience.",
"The purpose of this study is to analyse Iranian scientific publications in the neuroscience subfields by librarians and neuroscientists, using Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) via Web of Science data over the period, 200... |
23428294 | Neuropsychological assessment and the paradox of ADHD. | Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a behaviorally defined diagnosis. Despite the fact that neuropsychological tests have typically been used successfully to investigate the functional neuroanatomy of ADHD in neuroimaging research paradigms, these tests have been of surprisingly limited utility in the clinical diagnosis of the disorder. This article examines this paradox by reviewing the characteristics of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnosis versus neuropsychological nomenclature, by reviewing the assumptions about etiologies for ADHD and by demonstrating how an emerging dimensional approach to diagnostic assessment can be combined with large-scale brain network studies to enhance the role of neuropsychological evaluation within clinical settings. This selective topical review is intended to arm practicing neuropsychologists with knowledge of new ideas, theories, and methods related to the causes of ADHD to prepare them for meaningful advances in understanding and assessing the disorder that are possible during the next decade.</AbstractText | [
[
"21325522",
"Origin and determination of inhibitory cell lineages in the vertebrate retina.",
"Multipotent progenitors in the vertebrate retina often generate clonally related mixtures of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The postmitotically expressed transcription factor, Ptf1a, is essential for all... | [
[
"23275858",
"Brain state-triggered stimulus delivery: An efficient tool for probing ongoing brain activity.",
"What is the relationship between variability in ongoing brain activity <i"
]
] |
22520647 | European study of research and development in mobility technology for persons with disabilities. | \In the fall of 2010, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Veteran's Administration jointly supported a review of mobility technology in Europe. A delegation of American Scientists traveled to Europe to visit a number of research centers and engaged in a demonstration and dialogue related to the global state-of-the-art for mobility impairment rectification and augmentation. From the observations and exchanges between the U.S. delegation and host institutions, the researchers were able to derive a series of papers which are now published in this thematic series of Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation. The papers describe the main themes of the European mobility technology research activities showing a healthy picture of research and innovation in the field.</AbstractText | [
[
"20427643",
"Emotional automaticity is a matter of timing.",
"There has been a long controversy concerning whether the amygdala's response to emotional stimuli is automatic or dependent on attentional load. Using magnoencephalography and an advanced beamformer source localization technique, we found t... | [
[
"22155385",
"Metabotropic glutamate receptor 1 (mGluR1): antibody specificity and receptor expression in cultured primary neurons.",
"The availability of high quality, well-characterized antibodies for molecular and cellular neuroscience studies is important. However, not all available antibodies are ... |
22751865 | Human aquaporin 4281-300 is the immunodominant linear determinant in the context of HLA-DRB1*03:01: relevance for diagnosing and monitoring patients with neuromyelitis optica. | OBJECTIVE To identify linear determinants of human aquaporin 4 (hAQP4) in the context of HLA-DRB1*03:01. DESIGN In this controlled study with humanized experimental animals, HLA-DRB1*03:01 transgenic mice were immunized with whole-protein hAQP4 emulsified in complete Freund adjuvant. To test T-cell responses, lymph node cells and splenocytes were cultured in vitro with synthetic peptides 20 amino acids long that overlap by 10 amino acids across the entirety of hAQP4. The frequency of interferon γ, interleukin (IL) 17, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, and IL-5-secreting CD4+ T cells was determined by the enzyme-linked immunosorbent sport assay. Quantitative immunofluorescence microscopy was performed to determine whether hAQP4281-300 inhibits the binding of anti-hAQP4 recombinant antibody to surface full-length hAQP4. SETTING Academic neuroimmunology laboratories. SUBJECTS Humanized HLA-DRB1*03:01+/+ H-2b-/- transgenic mice on a B10 background. RESULTS Peptide hAQP4281-300 generated a significantly (P &lt;.01) greater TH1 and TH17 immune response than any of the other linear peptides screened. This 20mer peptide contains 2 dominant immunogenic 15mer peptides. hAQP4284-298 induced predominantly an IL-17 and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor TH cell phenotype, whereas hAQP4285-299 resulted in a higher frequency of TH1 cells. hAQP4281-300 did not interfere with recombinant AQP4 autoantibody binding. CONCLUSIONS hAQP4281-330 is the dominant linear immunogenic determinant of hAQP4 in the context of HLA-DRB1*03:01. Within hAQP4281-330 are 2 dominant immunogenic determinants that induce differential TH phenotypes. hAQP4 determinants identified in this study can serve as diagnostic biomarkers in patients with neuromyelitis optica and may facilitate the monitoring of treatment responses to pharmacotherapies.</AbstractText | [
[
"21731699",
"Recognition of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine by the Uhrf1 SRA domain.",
"Recent discovery of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) in genomic DNA raises the question how this sixth base is recognized by cellular proteins. In contrast to the methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) of MeCP2, we found that the S... | [
[
"24294562",
"Dorello's Canal and Gruber's Ligament: Historical Perspective.",
"Wenzel Leopold Gruber and Primo Dorello were great anatomists and researchers during the 19th and 20th centuries. Their contributions to neuroanatomy-namely the Gruber's (petrosphenoidal) ligament and Dorello's canal, respe... |
23276394 | Biological mechanisms associated with increased perseveration and hyperactivity in a genetic mouse model of neurodevelopmental disorder. | Chromosomal deletions at Xp22.3 appear to influence vulnerability to the neurodevelopmental disorders attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism. 39,X(Y*)O mice, which lack the murine orthologue of the Xp22.3 ADHD candidate gene STS (encoding steroid sulfatase), exhibit behavioural phenotypes relevant to such disorders (e.g. hyperactivity), elevated hippocampal serotonin (5-HT) levels, and reduced serum levels of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). Here we initially show that 39,X(Y*)O mice are also deficient for the recently-characterised murine orthologue of the Xp22.3 autism candidate gene ASMT (encoding acetylserotonin-O-methyltransferase). Subsequently, to specify potential behavioural correlates of elevated hippocampal 5-HT arising due to the genetic lesion, we compared 39,X(Y*)O MF1 mice to 40,XY MF1 mice on behavioural tasks taxing hippocampal and/or 5-HT function (a 'foraging' task, an object-location task, and the 1-choice serial reaction time task of impulsivity). Although Sts/Asmt deficiency did not influence foraging behaviour, reactivity to familiar objects in novel locations, or 'ability to wait', it did result in markedly increased response rates; these rates correlated with hippocampal 5-HT levels and are likely to index behavioural perseveration, a frequent feature of neurodevelopmental disorders. Additionally, we show that whilst there was no systematic relationship between serum DHEA levels and hippocampal 5-HT levels across 39,X(Y*)O and 40,XY mice, there was a significant inverse linear correlation between serum DHEA levels and activity. Our data suggest that deficiency for genes within Xp22.3 could influence core behavioural features of neurodevelopmental disorders via dissociable effects on hippocampal neurochemistry and steroid hormone levels, and that the mediating neurobiological mechanisms may be investigated in the 39,X(Y*)O model.</AbstractText | [
[
"18457512",
"Timing, storage, and comparison of stimulus duration engage discrete anatomical components of a perceptual timing network.",
"The temporal discrimination paradigm requires subjects to compare the duration of a probe stimulus to that of a sample previously stored in working or long-term me... | [
[
"23269483",
"Metabolomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid indicates iron deficiency compromises cerebral energy metabolism in the infant monkey.",
"Iron deficiency anemia affects many pregnant women and young infants worldwide. The health impact is significant, given iron's known role in many body func... |
23130007 | When Do We Confuse Self and Other in Action Memory? Reduced False Memories of Self-Performance after Observing Actions by an Out-Group vs. In-Group Actor. | Observing another person performing an action can lead to a false memory of having performed the action oneself - the observation-inflation effect. In the experimental paradigm, participants first perform or do not perform simple actions, and then observe another person perform some of these actions. The observation-inflation effect is found when participants later remember performing actions that they have merely observed. In this case, self and other are confused in action memory. We examined social conditions of this self-other confusion when remembering actions, specifically whether the effect depends on the observed actor's group membership. In our experiment, we manipulated group membership based on physical appearance, specifically complexion of the hands. Fair-skinned participants observed either an in-group (i.e., fair-skinned) or an out-group (i.e., dark-skinned) actor. Our results revealed that the observed actor's group membership moderated the observation-inflation effect: False memories were significantly reduced when the actor was from the out-group (vs. in-group). We found no difference to a control condition in which the actor wore black gloves, suggesting that distinctiveness of perceptual or sensory features alone (due to the out-group member's dark skin) is not critical. We discuss these findings in light of social-neuroscience studies demonstrating the impact of an observed person's group membership on motor simulation. Overall, our findings suggest that action memory can be affected by a ubiquitous feature of people's social perception, that is, group-based social categorization of others.</AbstractText | [
[
"19298949",
"Perceptual simulation in conceptual combination: evidence from property generation.",
"In three experiments, participants received nouns or noun phrases for objects and verbally generated their properties (\"feature listing\"). Several sources of evidence indicated that participants const... | [
[
"23055968",
"Detection of self-paced reaching movement intention from EEG signals.",
"Future neuroprosthetic devices, in particular upper limb, will require decoding and executing not only the user's intended movement type, but also when the user intends to execute the movement. This work investigates... |
23279177 | Neurochemistry of schizophrenia: the contribution of neuroimaging postmortem pathology and neurochemistry in schizophrenia. | The advent of molecular neuroimaging has greatly impacted on understanding the neurochemical changes occurring in the CNS from subjects with psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia. This review focuses on the outcomes from studies using positron emission tomography and single photon emission computer tomography that have measure levels of neurotransmitter receptors and transporters in the CNS from subjects with schizophrenia. One outcome from such studies is the confirmation of a number of findings using postmortem tissue, but in the case of neuroimaging, using drug na�ve and drug free subjects. These findings add weight to the argument that findings from postmortem studies are not an artifact of tissue processing or a simple drug effect. However, there are some important unique findings from studies using neuroimaging studies. These include evidence to suggest that in schizophrenia there are alterations in dopamine synthesis and release, which are not accompanied by an appropriate down-regulation of dopamine D2 receptors. There are also data that would support the notion that decreased levels of serotonin 2A receptors may be an early marker of the onset of schizophrenia. Whilst there is a clear need for on-going development of neuroimaging ligands to expand the number of targets that can be studied and to increase cohort sizes in neuroimaging studies to give power to the analyses of the resulting data, current studies show that existing neuroimaging studies have already extended our understanding of the underlying pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.</AbstractText | [
[
"11330208",
"Microdialysis perfusion of orexin-A in the basal forebrain increases wakefulness in freely behaving rats.",
"Recent work indicates that the orexin/hypocretin-containing neurons of the lateral hypothalamus are involved in control of REM sleep phenomena, but site-specific actions in control... | [
[
"22986407",
"How a common variant in the growth factor receptor gene, NTRK1, affects white matter.",
"Growth factors and their receptors are important for cellular migration as well as axonal guidance and myelination in the brain. They also play a key role in programmed cell death, and are implicated ... |
23197532 | A large-scale model of the functioning brain. | A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called "Spaun") that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.</AbstractText | [
[
"8854339",
"Role of an S4-S5 linker in sodium channel inactivation probed by mutagenesis and a peptide blocker.",
"A pair of conserved methionine residues, located on the cytoplasmic linker between segments S4 and S5 in the fourth domain of human heart Na channels (hH1), plays a role in the kinetics a... | [
[
"23505339",
"Baby Steps to Superintelligence: Neuroprosthetics and Children.",
"Children surviving neural injuries face challenges not seen by their adult counterparts, namely that they experience neural injury before reaching neurodevelopmental maturity. Neural prostheses offer one possible path to r... |
22143364 | Postural tachycardia syndrome--current experience and concepts. | Postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS) is a poorly understood but important cause of orthostatic intolerance resulting from cardiovascular autonomic dysfunction. PoTS is distinct from the syndromes of autonomic failure usually associated with orthostatic hypotension, such as pure autonomic failure and multiple system atrophy. Individuals affected by PoTS are mainly young (aged between 15 years and 40 years) and predominantly female. The symptoms--palpitations, dizziness and occasionally syncope--mainly occur when the patient is standing upright, and are often relieved by sitting or lying flat. Common stimuli in daily life, such as modest exertion, food ingestion and heat, are now recognized to be capable of exacerbating the symptoms. Onset of the syndrome can be linked to infection, trauma, surgery or stress. PoTS can be associated with various other disorders; in particular, joint hypermobility syndrome (also known as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome hypermobility type, formerly termed Ehlers-Danlos syndrome type III). This Review describes the characteristics and neuroepidemiology of PoTS, and outlines possible pathophysiological mechanisms of this syndrome, as well as current and investigational treatments.</AbstractText | [
[
"21749952",
"Social neuroscience: mirror neurons recorded in humans.",
"New single-cell recordings show that humans do have mirror neurons, and in more brain regions than previously suspected. Some action-execution neurons were seen to be inhibited during observation, possibly preventing imitation and... | [
[
"21960308",
"Open questions in computational motor control.",
"Computational motor control covers all applications of quantitative tools for the study of the biological movement control system. This paper provides a review of this field in the form of a list of open questions. After an introduction in... |
22481743 | Brain enabled by next-generation neurotechnology: using multiscale and multimodal models. | As many articles in this issue of IEEE Pulse demonstrate, interfacing directly with the brain presents several fundamental challenges. These challenges reside at multiple levels and span many disciplines, ranging from the need to understand brain states at the level of neural circuits to creating technological innovations to facilitate new therapeutic options. The goal of our multiuniversity research team, composed of researchers from Stanford University, Brown University, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and the University College London (UCL), is to substantially elevate the fundamental understanding of brain information processing and its relationship with sensation, behavior, and injury. Our team was assembled to provide expertise ranging from neuroscience to neuroengineering and to neurological and psychiatric clinical guidance, all of which are critical to the overarching research goal. By employing a suite of innovative experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery (REPAIR) team has set its sights on learning how the brain and its microcircuitry react (e.g., to sudden physiological changes) and what can be done to encourage recovery from such (reversible) injury. In this article, we summarize some of the team's technical goals, approaches, and early illustrative results.</AbstractText | [
[
"15928068",
"Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love.",
"Early-stage romantic love can induce euphoria, is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and is possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates. It has an important influence on so... | [
[
"22963990",
"Further characterization of repetitive behavior in C58 mice: developmental trajectory and effects of environmental enrichment.",
"Aberrant repetitive behaviors are commonly observed in a variety of neurodevelopmental, neurological, and neuropsychiatric disorders. Little is known about the... |
23493966 | Exploring sensory neuroscience through experience and experiment. | Many phenomena that we take for granted are illusions - color and motion on a TV or computer monitor, for example, or the impression of space in a stereo music recording. Even the stable image that we perceive when looking directly at the real world is illusory. One of the important lessons from sensory neuroscience is that our perception of the world is constructed rather than received. Sensory illusions effectively capture student interest, but how do you then move on to substantive discussion of neuroscience? This article illustrates several illusions, attempts to connect them to neuroscience, and shows how students can explore and experiment with them. Even when (as is often the case) there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for an illusion, students can form hypotheses and test them by manipulating stimuli and measuring their effects. In effect, students can experiment with illusions using themselves as subjects.</AbstractText | [
[
"11377409",
"Double-blind naltrexone and placebo comparison study in the treatment of pathological gambling.",
"The authors' goal was to assess the efficacy and tolerability of naltrexone in the treatment of pathologic gambling disorder.</AbstractText Eighty-three subjects who met criteria for DSM-IV ... | [
[
"23140422",
"Comparison of GPU- and CPU-implementations of mean-firing rate neural networks on parallel hardware.",
"Modern parallel hardware such as multi-core processors (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) have a high computational power which can be greatly beneficial to the simulation of l... |
23177656 | Synthetic event-related potentials: a computational bridge between neurolinguistic models and experiments. | Our previous work developed Synthetic Brain Imaging to link neural and schema network models of cognition and behavior to PET and fMRI studies of brain function. We here extend this approach to Synthetic Event-Related Potentials (Synthetic ERP). Although the method is of general applicability, we focus on ERP correlates of language processing in the human brain. The method has two components: Phase 1: To generate cortical electro-magnetic source activity from neural or schema network models; and Phase 2: To generate known neurolinguistic ERP data (ERP scalp voltage topographies and waveforms) from putative cortical source distributions and activities within a realistic anatomical model of the human brain and head. To illustrate the challenges of Phase 2 of the methodology, spatiotemporal information from Friederici's 2002 model of auditory language comprehension was used to define cortical regions and time courses of activation for implementation within a forward model of ERP data. The cortical regions from the 2002 model were modeled using atlas-based masks overlaid on the MNI high definition single subject cortical mesh. The electromagnetic contribution of each region was modeled using current dipoles whose position and orientation were constrained by the cortical geometry. In linking neural network computation via EEG forward modeling to empirical results in neurolinguistics, we emphasize the need for neural network models to link their architecture to geometrically sound models of the cortical surface, and the need for conceptual models to refine and adopt brain-atlas based approaches to allow precise brain anchoring of their modules. The detailed analysis of Phase 2 sets the stage for a brief introduction to Phase 1 of the program, including the case for a schema-theoretic approach to language production and perception presented in detail elsewhere. Unlike Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) and Bojak's mean field model, Synthetic ERP builds on models of networks that mediate the relation between the brain's inputs, outputs, and internal states in executing a specific task. The neural networks used for Synthetic ERP must include neuroanatomically realistic placement and orientation of the cortical pyramidal neurons. These constraints pose exciting challenges for future work in neural network modeling that is applicable to systems and cognitive neuroscience.</AbstractText | [
[
"17691351",
"An introduction to operative neuromodulation and functional neuroprosthetics, the new frontiers of clinical neuroscience and biotechnology.",
"Operative neuromodulation is the field of altering electrically or chemically the signal transmission in the nervous system by implanted devices i... | [
[
"23269439",
"The p.Ala510Val mutation in the SPG7 (paraplegin) gene is the most common mutation causing adult onset neurogenetic disease in patients of British ancestry.",
"The c.1529C >T change in the SPG7 gene, encoding the mutant p.Ala510Val paraplegin protein, was first described as a polymorph... |
22814704 | Inflammation in anxiety. | The idea of the existence of an interaction between the immune system and the central nervous system (CNS) has prompted extensive research interest into the subject of "Psychoneuroimmunology" taking the field to an interesting level where new hypotheses are being increasingly tested. Specifically, exactly how the cross talk of pathways and mechanisms enable immune system to influence our brain and behavior is a question of immense significance. Of particular relevance to this topic is the role of cytokines in regulating functions within the CNS that ultimately modulate behavior. Interestingly, psychological stress is reported to modulate cytokine production, suggesting potential relevance of this mediator to mental health. In fact, cytokine signaling in the brain is known to regulate important brain functions including neurotransmitter metabolism, neuroendocrine function, synaptic plasticity, as well as the neural circuitry of mood. It is rather obvious to expect an aberrant behavioral outcome as a result of a dysregulation in cytokine signaling which might lead to occurrence of depression, anxiety, and cognitive dysfunction. Thus, understanding the mechanisms by which the immune system influences behavior would reveal targets for potential therapeutic development as well as strategies for the prevention of neuropsychiatric diseases. To date, the presence of inflammatory responses and the crucial role of cytokines in depression have received most attention. However, considering a big socioeconomic impact due to an alarming increase in anxiety disorder patients, there is an urgent research need for a better understanding of the role of cytokines in anxiety. In this review, we discuss recent research on the role of neuroimmunology in anxiety. At the end, we offer an "oxidative stress theory," which we propose works perhaps as a "sensor of distress," the imbalance of which leads to neuroinflammation and causes anxiety disorders. Much research is needed to extensively test this theory keeping an open mind!</AbstractText | [
[
"17670965",
"Cell type-specific tuning of hippocampal interneuron firing during gamma oscillations in vivo.",
"Cortical gamma oscillations contribute to cognitive processing and are thought to be supported by perisomatic-innervating GABAergic interneurons. We performed extracellular recordings of iden... | [
[
"22986407",
"How a common variant in the growth factor receptor gene, NTRK1, affects white matter.",
"Growth factors and their receptors are important for cellular migration as well as axonal guidance and myelination in the brain. They also play a key role in programmed cell death, and are implicated ... |
23226198 | Formal comparison of dual-parameter temporal discounting models in controls and pathological gamblers. | Temporal or delay discounting refers to the phenomenon that the value of a reward is discounted as a function of time to delivery. A range of models have been proposed that approximate the shape of the discount curve describing the relationship between subjective value and time. Recent evidence suggests that more than one free parameter may be required to accurately model human temporal discounting data. Nonetheless, many temporal discounting studies in psychiatry, psychology and neuroeconomics still apply single-parameter models, despite their oftentimes poor fit to single-subject data. Previous comparisons of temporal discounting models have either not taken model complexity into account, or have overlooked particular models. Here we apply model comparison techniques in a large sample of temporal discounting datasets using several discounting models employed in the past. Among the models examined, an exponential-power model from behavioural economics (CS model, Ebert & Prelec 2007) provided the best fit to human laboratory discounting data. Inter-parameter correlations for the winning model were moderate, whereas they were substantial for other dual-parameter models examined. Analyses of previous group and context effects on temporal discounting with the winning model provided additional theoretical insights. The CS model may be a useful tool in future psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience work on inter-temporal choice.</AbstractText | [
[
"12951145",
"Structure and function of the vomeronasal system: an update.",
"Several developments during the past 15 years have profoundly affected our understanding of the vomeronasal system (VNS) of vertebrates. In the mid 1990s, the vomeronasal epithelium of mammals was found to contain two populat... | [
[
"23195123",
"Text-mining and neuroscience.",
"The wealth and diversity of neuroscience research are inherent characteristics of the discipline that can give rise to some complications. As the field continues to expand, we generate a great deal of data about all aspects, and from multiple perspectives,... |
22960226 | Empiricists are from Venus, modelers are from Mars: Reconciling experimental and computational approaches in cognitive neuroscience. | We describe how computational models can be useful to cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and discuss some guidelines for deciding whether a model is useful. We emphasize that because instantiating a cognitive theory as a computational model requires specification of an explicit mechanism for the function in question, it often produces clear and novel behavioral predictions to guide empirical research. However, computational modeling in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience remains somewhat rare, perhaps because of misconceptions concerning the use of computational models (in particular, connectionist models) in these fields. We highlight some common misconceptions, each of which relates to an aspect of computational models: the problem space of the model, the level of biological organization at which the model is formulated, and the importance (or not) of biological plausibility, parsimony, and model parameters. Careful consideration of these aspects of a model by empiricists, along with careful delineation of them by modelers, may facilitate communication between the two disciplines and promote the use of computational models for guiding cognitive and behavioral experiments.</AbstractText | [
[
"19120115",
"Chronic stress, combined with a high-fat/high-sugar diet, shifts sympathetic signaling toward neuropeptide Y and leads to obesity and the metabolic syndrome.",
"In response to stress, some people lose while others gain weight. This is believed to be due to either increased beta-adrenergic... | [
[
"23476081",
"Framing Nicotine Addiction as a \"Disease of the Brain\": Social and Ethical Consequences.",
"In this article, we seek to better understand how a genomic vision of addiction may influence drug prevention and treatment. Though <i We explore the emerging view of addiction as a \"disease of ... |
23267340 | Social working memory: neurocognitive networks and directions for future research. | Navigating the social world requires the ability to maintain and manipulate information about people's beliefs, traits, and mental states. We characterize this capacity as social working memory (SWM). To date, very little research has explored this phenomenon, in part because of the assumption that general working memory systems would support working memory for social information. Various lines of research, however, suggest that social cognitive processing relies on a neurocognitive network (i.e., the "mentalizing network") that is functionally distinct from, and considered antagonistic with, the canonical working memory network. Here, we review evidence suggesting that demanding social cognition requires SWM and that both the mentalizing and canonical working memory neurocognitive networks support SWM. The neural data run counter to the common finding of parametric decreases in mentalizing regions as a function of working memory demand and suggest that the mentalizing network can support demanding cognition, when it is demanding social cognition. Implications for individual differences in social cognition and pathologies of social cognition are discussed.</AbstractText | [
[
"16482083",
"Antipsychotic effects on prepulse inhibition in normal 'low gating' humans and rats.",
"Development of new antipsychotics and their novel applications may be facilitated through the use of physiological markers in clinically normal individuals. Both genetic and neurochemical evidence sugg... | [
[
"22922354",
"Selective interactions of spinophilin with the C-terminal domains of the δ- and μ-opioid receptors and G proteins differentially modulate opioid receptor signaling.",
"Previous studies have shown that the intracellular domains of opioid receptors serve as platforms for the formation of a ... |
19654141 | Neuroanthropology: a humanistic science for the study of the culture-brain nexus. | In this article, we argue that a combined anthropology/neuroscience field of enquiry can make a significant and distinctive contribution to the study of the relationship between culture and the brain. This field, which can appropriately be termed as neuroanthropology, is conceived of as being complementary to and mutually informative with social and cultural neuroscience. We start by providing an introduction to the culture concept in anthropology. We then present a detailed characterization of neuroanthropology and its methods and how they relate to the anthropological understanding of culture. The field is described as a humanistic science, that is, a field of enquiry founded on the perceived epistemological and methodological interdependence of science and the humanities. We also provide examples that illustrate the proposed methodological model for neuroanthropology. We conclude with a discussion about specific contributions the field can make to the study of the culture-brain nexus.</AbstractText | [
[
"19400719",
"The science of neural interface systems.",
"The ultimate goal of neural interface research is to create links between the nervous system and the outside world either by stimulating or by recording from neural tissue to treat or assist people with sensory, motor, or other disabilities of n... | [
[
"25205899",
"Neuroepidemiology of epilepsy in northwest India.",
"Epilepsy has a complex etiology characterised by recurring seizures.</AbstractText To study clinical profile of epilepsy patients with reference to type of epilepsy in northwest India. No previous Indian study has reported relative inci... |
19943188 | Fast Kalman filtering on quasilinear dendritic trees. | Optimal filtering of noisy voltage signals on dendritic trees is a key problem in computational cellular neuroscience. However, the state variable in this problem-the vector of voltages at every compartment-is very high-dimensional: realistic multicompartmental models often have on the order of N = 10(4) compartments. Standard implementations of the Kalman filter require O(N (3)) time and O(N (2)) space, and are therefore impractical. Here we take advantage of three special features of the dendritic filtering problem to construct an efficient filter: (1) dendritic dynamics are governed by a cable equation on a tree, which may be solved using sparse matrix methods in O(N) time; and current methods for observing dendritic voltage (2) provide low SNR observations and (3) only image a relatively small number of compartments at a time. The idea is to approximate the Kalman equations in terms of a low-rank perturbation of the steady-state (zero-SNR) solution, which may be obtained in O(N) time using methods that exploit the sparse tree structure of dendritic dynamics. The resulting methods give a very good approximation to the exact Kalman solution, but only require O(N) time and space. We illustrate the method with applications to real and simulated dendritic branching structures, and describe how to extend the techniques to incorporate spatially subsampled, temporally filtered, and nonlinearly transformed observations.</AbstractText | [
[
"11222789",
"Paraplegin gene analysis in hereditary spastic paraparesis (HSP) pedigrees in northeast England.",
"To identify the frequency and characterize the phenotype of paraplegin mutations in the hereditary spastic paraparesis (HSP) population in the northeast of England.</AbstractText HSP is a d... | [
[
"20826300",
"Neuroscience and education: an ideal partnership for producing evidence-based solutions to Guide 21(st) Century Learning.",
"Neuro-Education is a nascent discipline that seeks to blend the collective fields of neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and education to create a better u... |
23365838 | Simultaneous ODF estimation and tractography in HARDI. | We consider the problem of tracking white matter fibers in high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) data while simultaneously estimating the local fiber orientation profile. Prior work showed that an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) can be used for this problem, yet existing algorithms employ parametric mixture models to represent water diffusion and to define the state space. To address this restrictive model dependency, we propose to extend the UKF to HARDI data modeled by orientation distribution functions (ODFs), a more generic diffusion model. We consider the spherical harmonic representation of the HARDI signal as the state, enforce nonnegativity of the ODFs, and perform tractography using the directions at which the ODFs attain their peaks. In simulations, our method outperforms filtered two-tensor tractography at different levels of noise by achieving a reduction in mean Chamfer error of 0.05 to 0.27 voxels; it also produced in vivo fiber tracking that is consistent with the neuroanatomy.</AbstractText | [
[
"15831717",
"Resting microglial cells are highly dynamic surveillants of brain parenchyma in vivo.",
"Microglial cells represent the immune system of the mammalian brain and therefore are critically involved in various injuries and diseases. Little is known about their role in the healthy brain and th... | [
[
"23542825",
"Neuroanatomy of Cornudescoides kulkarnii n. sp., a gill parasite of Mystus vittatus in Meerut (UP), India.",
"Chemical named 5-bromo indoxyl acetate has been used to describe the nervous system of a viviparous monogenean Cornudescoides Kulkarni (1969), a gill parasite of Mystus vittatus. ... |
23926462 | Neurogenetics and Nutrigenomics of Neuro-Nutrient Therapy for Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS): Clinical Ramifications as a Function of Molecular Neurobiological Mechanisms. | In accord with the new definition of addiction published by American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) it is well-known that individuals who present to a treatment center involved in chemical dependency or other documented reward dependence behaviors have impaired brain reward circuitry. They have hypodopaminergic function due to genetic and/or environmental negative pressures upon the reward neuro-circuitry. This impairment leads to aberrant craving behavior and other behaviors such as Substance Use Disorder (SUD). Neurogenetic research in both animal and humans revealed that there is a well-defined cascade in the reward site of the brain that leads to normal dopamine release. This cascade has been termed the "Brain Reward Cascade" (BRC). Any impairment due to either genetics or environmental influences on this cascade will result in a reduced amount of dopamine release in the brain reward site. Manipulation of the BRC has been successfully achieved with neuro-nutrient therapy utilizing nutrigenomic principles. After over four decades of development, neuro-nutrient therapy has provided important clinical benefits when appropriately utilized. This is a review, with some illustrative case histories from a number of addiction professionals, of certain molecular neurobiological mechanisms which if ignored may lead to clinical complications.</AbstractText | [
[
"15663891",
"Orexin A promotes histamine, but not norepinephrine or serotonin, release in frontal cortex of mice.",
"To investigate the effects of orexin A on release of histamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin in the frontal cortex of mice.</AbstractText Samples for measuring histamine, norepinephrin... | [
[
"23060781",
"Using \"smart stimulators\" to treat Parkinson's disease: re-engineering neurostimulation devices.",
"Let's imagine the cruise control of your car locked at 120 km/h on any road in any condition (city, country, highway, sunny or rainy weather), or your car air conditioner set on ma... |
22639700 | Mitochondrial DNA: A Blind Spot in Neuroepigenetics. | Neuroepigenetics, which includes nuclear DNA modifications such as 5-methylcytosine and 5-hydoxymethylcytosine and modifications of nuclear proteins such as histones, is emerging as the leading field in molecular neuroscience. Historically, a functional role for epigenetic mechanisms, including in neuroepigenetics, has been sought in the area of the regulation of nuclear transcription. However, one important compartment of mammalian cell DNA, different from nuclear but equally important for physiological and pathological processes (including in the brain), mitochondrial DNA has for the most part not had a systematic epigenetic characterization. The importance of mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA (particularly its mutations) in central nervous system physiology and pathology has long been recognized. Only recently have mechanisms of mitochondrial DNA methylation and hydroxymethylation, including the discovery of mitochondrial DNA-methyltransferases and the presence and the functionality of 5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine in mitochondrial DNA (e.g., in modifying the transcription of mitochondrial genome), been unequivocally recognized as a part of mammalian mitochondrial physiology. Here we summarize for the first time evidence supporting the existence of these mechanisms and we propose the term "mitochondrial epigenetics" to be used when referring to them. Currently, neuroepigenetics does not include mitochondrial epigenetics - a gap that we expect to close in the near future.</AbstractText | [
[
"8490989",
"Epidemiology of epilepsy in developing countries.",
"Epilepsy is an important health problem in developing countries, where its prevalence can be up to 57 per 1000 population. This article reviews the epidemiology of epilepsy in developing countries in terms of its incidence, prevalence, s... | [
[
"23366028",
"Transcranial direct current stimulation in pediatric brain: a computational modeling study.",
"Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a method of non-invasive brain stimulation which uses weak electric currents applied on the scalp to modulate activity of underlying brain tissu... |
23366028 | Transcranial direct current stimulation in pediatric brain: a computational modeling study. | Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a method of non-invasive brain stimulation which uses weak electric currents applied on the scalp to modulate activity of underlying brain tissue. In addition to being used as a tool for cognitive neuroscience investigations, tDCS has generated considerable interest for use as a therapeutic modality for neurologic disorders. Though the safety and tolerability of tDCS in adults is well-established, there is little information on the safety of tDCS in children. Because there are differences between children and adults in several key parameters (such as skull thickness and cerebrospinal fluid volume) which affect current flow through the brain, special consideration should be given to the stimulation parameters which are used in a pediatric study population. In this study we present cortical electrical field maps at different stimulation intensities and electrode configurations using a high-resolution-MRI derived finite element model of a typically developing, anatomically normal 12 year old child. The peak electrical fields for a given stimulus intensity in the adolescent brain were twice as high as in the adult brain for conventional tDCS and nearly four times as high for a 4X1 High-Definition tDCS electrode configuration. These data suggest that acceptable tDCS stimulation parameters may be different in children compared to adults, and that further modeling studies are needed to help guide decisions about applied current intensity.</AbstractText | [
[
"12721816",
"Dopamine D3 receptor gene polymorphism and violent behavior: relation to impulsiveness and ADHD-related psychopathology.",
"Several lines of evidence indicate that dopaminergic neurotransmission is involved in the regulation of impulsive aggression and violence and that genetically determ... | [
[
"23202064",
"Three-dimensional multiwaveguide probe array for light delivery to distributed brain circuits.",
"To deliver light to the brain for neuroscientific and neuroengineering applications like optogenetics, in which light is used to activate or silence neurons expressing specific photosensitive... |
23504543 | Bio-amplifier with Driven Shield Inputs to Reduce Electrical Noise and its Application to Laboratory Teaching of Electrophysiology. | We describe a custom-designed bio-amplifier and its use in teaching neurophysiology to undergraduate students. The amplifier has the following features: 1) differential amplification with driven shield inputs, which makes it workable even in electrically unshielded environments, 2) high input impedance to allow recordings of small signals through high signal source impedance, 3) dual fixed frequency bandpass filters (1-340Hz for surface EMG, EEG, local field potential etc and 320Hz - 3.4kHz for neuronal action potential recording) and independent gain controllers (up to x107,000) to allow the recording of different signals from the same source (e.g., local field potential and spiking activity of neurons), and 4) printed circuit board technology for easy replication with consistent quality. We compared its performance with a commercial amplifier in an electrically noisy environment. Even without any electrostatic shield, it recorded clear electromyographic activity with little interference from other electric appliances. In contrast, the commercial amplifier's performance severely deteriorated under the same condition. We used this amplifier to build a computer-controlled stimulation and measurement system for electroencephalographic recordings by undergraduate students. The students successfully recorded various sensory evoked potentials with clarity that otherwise would have required costly instruments. This amplifier is a low-cost yet reliable instrument for electro-physiological recording both in education and research.</AbstractText | [
[
"21386006",
"Optogenetics in the teaching laboratory: using channelrhodopsin-2 to study the neural basis of behavior and synaptic physiology in Drosophila.",
"Here we incorporate recent advances in Drosophila neurogenetics and \"optogenetics\" into neuroscience laboratory exercises. We used the light-... | [
[
"22958820",
"How variable clones build an invariant retina.",
"A fundamental question in developmental neuroscience is how a collection of progenitor cells proliferates and differentiates to create a brain of the appropriate size and cellular composition. To address this issue, we devised lineage-trac... |
22557965 | An ontological approach to describing neurons and their relationships. | The advancement of neuroscience, perhaps one of the most information rich disciplines of all the life sciences, requires basic frameworks for organizing the vast amounts of data generated by the research community to promote novel insights and integrated understanding. Since Cajal, the neuron remains a fundamental unit of the nervous system, yet even with the explosion of information technology, we still have few comprehensive or systematic strategies for aggregating cell-level knowledge. Progress toward this goal is hampered by the multiplicity of names for cells and by lack of a consensus on the criteria for defining neuron types. However, through umbrella projects like the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) and the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), we have the opportunity to propose and implement an informatics infrastructure for establishing common tools and approaches to describe neurons through a standard terminology for nerve cells and a database (a Neuron Registry) where these descriptions can be deposited and compared. This article provides an overview of the problem and outlines a solution approach utilizing ontological characterizations. Based on illustrative implementation examples, we also discuss the need for consensus criteria to be adopted by the research community, and considerations on future developments. A scalable repository of neuron types will provide researchers with a resource that materially contributes to the advancement of neuroscience.</AbstractText | [
[
"17049754",
"Behavioral impulsivity predicts treatment outcome in a smoking cessation program for adolescent smokers.",
"To examine the relationship between impulsivity and smoking cessation treatment response among adolescents.</AbstractText Thirty adolescent smokers participated in a high school bas... | [
[
"23130007",
"When Do We Confuse Self and Other in Action Memory? Reduced False Memories of Self-Performance after Observing Actions by an Out-Group vs. In-Group Actor.",
"Observing another person performing an action can lead to a false memory of having performed the action oneself - the observation-i... |
23504612 | An undergraduate laboratory exercise examining the psychomotor stimulant effects of caffeine in laboratory rats. | This paper describes an exercise in a Systems and Behavioral Neuroscience with Laboratory class, an introductory laboratory class taken by Barnard College students majoring in a wide range of academic topics. The study took place over three weeks, allowing students to assess the effects of caffeine on motor stimulation in laboratory rats. The within-subject design involved injecting rats with three different caffeine doses and measuring five different motor outputs in a standard open field. Students completed four different assignments related to this study, demonstrating acquisition of the stated learning goals. This lab exercise allowed students to learn about basal ganglia neural circuitry and stimulant pharmacology, to work directly with an animal model, and to generate enough data to perform statistical analyses. Course evaluations suggest that students liked learning about caffeine, a stimulant many of them have personal experience consuming. They also expressed appreciation for working with rats and for learning how to analyze data. This study can easily be implemented at most undergraduate institutions under minimal cost. The wide-ranging effects of caffeine also permit for flexibility in experimental design, allowing instructors and students options for different avenues of investigation.</AbstractText | [
[
"17940025",
"Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation.",
"Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participant... | [
[
"22925211",
"Developmental neurotoxicity testing: scientific approaches towards the next generation to protect the developing nervous system of children. An overview of the Developmental Neurotoxicity Symposium in 2011.",
"The Developmental Neurotoxicology (DNT) Committee has been working to promote d... |
22977368 | Coping with Brain Disorders using Neurotechnology. | Brain disorders account for more than 34% of the global burden of disease, crippling nations by decreasing their "mental capital"-with greater effect in developing countries. Early detection is the key to their management, but establishing such programmes seems nearly impossible due to the high prevalence of the dysfunctions as compared with the high cost of neuroimaging devices. Thus, at first sight, the research of the Decade of the Brain and the international Human Brain Mapping Project might seem to be condemned to benefit only a small elite. Cuba has shown that is not so by using neurotechnology for the last 3 decades to implement stratified active screening programmes for brain disorders at the population level. This experience has shown that, by the transformation of health indicators, an appropriate use of technology can be integrated with attention to the population at the primary levels of both health care and education. An essential component of neurotechnology is neuroinformatics, which-like its counterpart bioinformatics-combines databases, analysis tools, and theoretical models to craft tools for early disease diagnosis and management. Much work remains to be done and will depend critically on south-south cooperation to solve problems for countries with similar situations.</AbstractText | [
[
"12716950",
"Hierarchical processing in spoken language comprehension.",
"Understanding spoken language requires a complex series of processing stages to translate speech sounds into meaning. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the brain regions that are involved in ... | [
[
"23110153",
"Prediction of muscle activities from electrocorticograms in primary motor cortex of primates.",
"Electrocorticography (ECoG) has drawn attention as an effective recording approach for brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Previous studies have succeeded in classifying movement intention and pre... |
23420996 | The fundamental role of morphology in experimental neurotoxicology: the example of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neurotoxicity. | The peripheral nervous system is a frequent target of toxic agents. The accurate identification of the sites of neurotoxic action through the morphological characterization of reliable in vivo models or in vitro systems can give fundamental clues when investigating the pathogenesis and interpreting the clinical features of drug-induced neuropathy. The morphological approach has been used to investigate almost all the anticancer drugs able to induce chemotherapy-induced peripheral neurotoxicity, i.e. platinum drugs, antitubulins and proteasome inhibitors. No models have ever been described for thalidomide. This review demonstrates that any pathogenetic study on chemotherapy-induced peripheral neurotoxicity must be based on solid morphological observations obtained in reliable animal and in vitro models. This is particularly true in this setting, since the availability of tissues of human origin is extremely limited. In fact, peripheral (generally sural) nerve biopsies are never required for diagnostic purposes in chemotherapy-treated cancer patients, and their use for a purely scientific aim, although potentially very informative, is not ethical. Moreover, several neurotoxic drugs target the dorsal root ganglia neurons, and it is very difficult to obtain high-quality specimens even from early autopsies. It is, therefore, our opinion that an extensive morphological assessment of the in vitro and in vivo effect of any potentially neurotoxic antineoplastic drugs, as well as of neuroprotectant agents, should be taken into consideration right from the earliest stages of their development.</AbstractText | [
[
"22430310",
"Cloning and expression of tachykinins and their association with kisspeptins in the brains of zebrafish.",
"The tachykinins are a family of neuropeptides, including substance P (SP), neurokinin A (NKA), and neurokinin B (NKB), that are encoded by the tac1 (SP and NKA) or tac2/3 (NKB) gene... | [
[
"23010511",
"Transcriptome analysis of Drosophila CNS midline cells reveals diverse peptidergic properties and a role for castor in neuronal differentiation.",
"One of the key aspects of neuronal differentiation is the array of neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter receptors that each neuron possesse... |
23142960 | Current concept of neuromyelitis optica (NMO) and NMO spectrum disorders. | Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) has been described as a disease clinically characterised by severe optic neuritis (ON) and transverse myelitis (TM). Other features of NMO include female preponderance, longitudinally extensive spinal cord lesions (>3 vertebral segments), and absence of oligoclonal IgG bands . In spite of these differences from multiple sclerosis (MS), the relationship between NMO and MS has long been controversial. However, since the discovery of NMO-IgG or aquaporin-4 (AQP4) antibody (AQP4-antibody), an NMO-specific autoantibody to AQP4, the dominant water channel in the central nervous system densely expressed on end-feet of astrocytes, unique clinical features, MRI and other laboratory findings in NMO have been clarified further. AQP4-antibody is now the most important laboratory finding for the diagnosis of NMO. Apart from NMO, some patients with recurrent ON or recurrent longitudinally extensive myelitis alone are also often positive for AQP4-antibody. Moreover, studies of AQP4-antibody-positive patients have revealed that brain lesions are not uncommon in NMO, and some patterns appear to be unique to NMO. Thus, the spectrum of NMO is wider than mere ON and TM. Pathological analyses of autopsied cases strongly suggest that unlike MS, astrocytic damage is the primary pathology in NMO, and experimental studies confirm the pathogenicity of AQP4-antibody. Importantly, therapeutic outcomes of some immunological treatments are different between NMO and MS, making early differential diagnosis of these two disorders crucial. We provide an overview of the epidemiology, clinical and neuroimaging features, immunopathology and therapy of NMO and NMO spectrum disorders.</AbstractText | [
[
"22304908",
"Immune cells exploit a neural circuit to enter the CNS.",
"Multiple sclerosis (MS) is associated with the appearance of autoreactive T cells in the central nervous system. Using a mouse model of MS, Arima et al. now show that this attack begins at a specific spinal cord location... | [
[
"23010509",
"Using mouse models of autism spectrum disorders to study the neurotoxicology of gene-environment interactions.",
"To better study the role of genetics in autism, mouse models have been developed which mimic the genetics of specific autism spectrum and related disorders. These models have ... |
20797539 | Spatiotemporal response properties of optic-flow processing neurons. | A central goal in sensory neuroscience is to fully characterize a neuron's input-output relation. However, strong nonlinearities in the responses of sensory neurons have made it difficult to develop models that generalize to arbitrary stimuli. Typically, the standard linear-nonlinear models break down when neurons exhibit stimulus-dependent modulations of their gain or selectivity. We studied these issues in optic-flow processing neurons in the fly. We found that the neurons' receptive fields are fully described by a time-varying vector field that is space-time separable. Increasing the stimulus strength, however, strongly reduces the neurons' gain and selectivity. To capture these changes in response behavior, we extended the linear-nonlinear model by a biophysically motivated gain and selectivity mechanism. We fit all model parameters directly to the data and show that the model now characterizes the neurons' input-output relation well over the full range of motion stimuli.</AbstractText | [
[
"11253062",
"Association study designs for complex diseases.",
"Assessing the association between DNA variants and disease has been used widely to identify regions of the genome and candidate genes that contribute to disease. However, there are numerous examples of associations that cannot be replicat... | [
[
"22958820",
"How variable clones build an invariant retina.",
"A fundamental question in developmental neuroscience is how a collection of progenitor cells proliferates and differentiates to create a brain of the appropriate size and cellular composition. To address this issue, we devised lineage-trac... |
22958820 | How variable clones build an invariant retina. | A fundamental question in developmental neuroscience is how a collection of progenitor cells proliferates and differentiates to create a brain of the appropriate size and cellular composition. To address this issue, we devised lineage-tracing assays in developing zebrafish embryos to reconstruct entire retinal lineage progressions in vivo and thereby provide a complete quantitative map of the generation of a vertebrate CNS tissue from individual progenitors. These lineage data are consistent with a simple model in which the retina is derived from a set of equipotent retinal progenitor cells (RPCs) that are subject to stochastic factors controlling lineage progression. Clone formation in mutant embryos reveals that the transcription factor Ath5 acts as a molecular link between fate choice and mode of cell division, giving insight into the elusive molecular mechanisms of histogenesis, the conserved temporal order by which neurons of different types exit the cell cycle.</AbstractText | [
[
"9222381",
"Molecular mimicry between HIV-1 gp41 and an astrocyte isoform of alpha-actinin.",
"A 100-kDa astrocyte antigen previously shown to cross-react with a monoclonal antibody (MAb) generated against amino acids (aa) 598 to 609 of the transmembrane protein gp41 of human immunodeficiency virus ty... | [
[
"23227112",
"A Social Neuroscience Perspective on Stress and Health.",
"Psychological stress is a major risk factor for the development and progression of a number of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, and major depression. A growing body of research suggests that long-term... |
21345429 | Challenging the supremacy of the frontal lobe: early views (1906-1909) of Christfried Jakob on the human cerebral cortex. | This article focuses on a series of six studies that address functional localization in the frontal lobe; they were published in Argentina between 1906 and 1909 by Christfried Jakob (1866-1956), one of the great thinkers in early 20th century neuropathology and neurophilosophy. At that time, the localization-holism controversy was at a peak, having been triggered by the historic Marie-Déjerine aphasiology debate. Jakob held the view that constitutive physiological elements of cognition are localized. Nonetheless, he cast doubt on phrenological approaches that considered the frontal lobe as 'superior' to the other cortical regions. Jakob studied the human frontal lobe from fetal life through senility, in normality and pathology, including tumors, injuries, softening, general paralysis and dementia. Based on those finds, he considered strict localization theories a dead-end. Taking a critical look at Flechsig's ideas on the parallel ontogenies of frontal association centers and intellect, Jakob argued that the frontal lobe does not carry any selective advantage over the remaining human cerebral lobes or even over the frontal lobe in non-human primates. Regarding lesion experiments in laboratory animals, he pointed to methodological caveats, such as insufficient recovery time, that may lead to disorientating conclusions, and rejected élite brain research, calling it superficial and inexact. Jakob was convinced that the verification of the anatomical connections of the frontal lobe would elucidate its functions. Thus, he viewed the frontal lobe as a central station receiving input via olfactory pathways and thalamic radiations, pertinent to muscular and cutaneous senses, and attributed a perceptive character to a brain region traditionally associated with productive functions. Modern neuroscience seems to support Jakob's rejection of distinguishable motor and sensory regions and to adopt a cautious stance concerning oversimplified localization views.</AbstractText | [
[
"21896369",
"The size and burden of mental disorders and other disorders of the brain in Europe 2010.",
"To provide 12-month prevalence and disability burden estimates of a broad range of mental and neurological disorders in the European Union (EU) and to compare these findings to previous estimates. ... | [
[
"23110153",
"Prediction of muscle activities from electrocorticograms in primary motor cortex of primates.",
"Electrocorticography (ECoG) has drawn attention as an effective recording approach for brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Previous studies have succeeded in classifying movement intention and pre... |
23428079 | Capturing specific abilities as a window into human individuality: the example of face recognition. | Proper characterization of each individual's unique pattern of strengths and weaknesses requires good measures of diverse abilities. Here, we advocate combining our growing understanding of neural and cognitive mechanisms with modern psychometric methods in a renewed effort to capture human individuality through a consideration of specific abilities. We articulate five criteria for the isolation and measurement of specific abilities, then apply these criteria to face recognition. We cleanly dissociate face recognition from more general visual and verbal recognition. This dissociation stretches across ability as well as disability, suggesting that specific developmental face recognition deficits are a special case of a broader specificity that spans the entire spectrum of human face recognition performance. Item-by-item results from 1,471 web-tested participants, included as supplementary information, fuel item analyses, validation, norming, and item response theory (IRT) analyses of our three tests: (a) the widely used Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT); (b) an Abstract Art Memory Test (AAMT), and (c) a Verbal Paired-Associates Memory Test (VPMT). The availability of this data set provides a solid foundation for interpreting future scores on these tests. We argue that the allied fields of experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and vision science could fuel the discovery of additional specific abilities to add to face recognition, thereby providing new perspectives on human individuality.</AbstractText | [
[
"15831717",
"Resting microglial cells are highly dynamic surveillants of brain parenchyma in vivo.",
"Microglial cells represent the immune system of the mammalian brain and therefore are critically involved in various injuries and diseases. Little is known about their role in the healthy brain and th... | [
[
"22946114",
"Giuseppe Ferrario and the epidemiology of apoplexy during the 19th century.",
"To analyze the pioneering research of Giuseppe Ferrario (1802-1870) on the epidemiology of apoplexy. To our knowledge, his work might have been the first to systematically investigate the epidemiology of cerebr... |
22483076 | Isolating N400 as neural marker of vocal anger processing in 6-11-year old children. | Vocal anger is a salient social signal serving adaptive functions in typical child development. Despite recent advances in the developmental neuroscience of emotion processing with regard to visual stimuli, little remains known about the neural correlates of vocal anger processing in childhood. This study represents the first attempt to isolate a neural marker of vocal anger processing in children using electrophysiological methods.</AbstractText We compared ERP wave forms during the processing of non-word emotional vocal stimuli in a population sample of 55 6-11-year-old typically developing children. Children listened to three types of stimuli expressing angry, happy, and neutral prosody and completed an emotion identification task with three response options (angry, happy and neutral/'ok').</AbstractText A distinctive N400 component which was modulated by emotional content of vocal stimulus was observed in children over parietal and occipital scalp regions-amplitudes were significantly attenuated to angry compared to happy and neutral voices.</AbstractText Findings of the present study regarding the N400 are compatible with adult studies showing reduced N400 amplitudes to negative compared to neutral emotional stimuli. Implications for studies of the neural basis of vocal anger processing in children are discussed.</AbstractText | [
[
"2687720",
"Two-stage model of memory trace formation: a role for \"noisy\" brain states.",
"Review of the normally occurring neuronal patterns of the hippocampus suggests that the two principal cell types of the hippocampus, the pyramidal neurons and granule cells, are maximally active during differe... | [
[
"23493834",
"Teaching neuroinformatics with an emphasis on quantitative locus analysis.",
"Although powerful bioinformatics tools are available for free on the web and are used by neuroscience professionals on a daily basis, neuroscience students are largely ignorant of them. This Neuroinformatics mod... |
23671950 | Effect of head circumference on parameters of pattern reversal visual evoked potential in healthy adults of central India. | Visual evoked response testing has been one of the most exciting clinical tools to be developed from neurophysiologic research in recent years and has provided us with an objective method of identifying abnormalities of the afferent visual pathways. Investigation were carried out to see whether the head circumference influence the pattern reversal visual evoked potential (PRVEP) parameters. The study comprised of pattern reversal visual evoked potential (PRVEP) recordings in 400 eyes of 200 normal subjects. Two hundred fourty eight eyes were males and 152 eyes were from 76 female subjects recruited from the Central Indian population in the age range of 40-79 years. Visual evoked potential (VEP) recordings were performed in accordance to the standardized methodology of International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology (IFCN) Committee Recommendations and International Society for Clinical Electrophysiology of Vision (ISCEV) Guidelines and montages were kept as per 10-20 International System of EEG Electrode placements. The stimulus configuration in this study consisted of the transient pattern reversal method in which a black and white checker board was generated (full field) and displayed on a VEP Monitor by an electronic pattern regenerator inbuilt in an Evoked Potential Recorder (RMS EMG EP MARK II). VEP latencies, duration and amplitude were measured in all subjects and the data were analyzed. The correlation of all the electrophysiological parameters with head circumference was evaluated by Pearson's correlation co-efficient (r) and its statistical significance was evaluated. The prediction equations for all the VEP parameters with respect to head circumference were derived. We found a positive correlation of P 100 latency and N 155 latency with mean head circumference, while a highly significant negative correlation were noted of P 100 amplitude with head circumference. N 70 latency was significantly correlated with head circumference. P 100 duration showed in negative correlation with head circumference. These findings suggest that VEP latencies, duration and amplitude are influenced by the head circumference of the individual in a sample of healthy subjects and head circumference can be a useful predictor of VEP peak latencies, amplitude and duration.</AbstractText | [
[
"15371227",
"Specific non-coplanar PCB-mediated modulation of bottlenose dolphin and beluga whale phagocytosis upon in vitro exposure.",
"Contaminant-induced immunosuppression by organochlorines (OC), particularly polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), has been suspected as a cofactor in the deaths of thou... | [
[
"22307590",
"Functional profiling of neurons through cellular neuropharmacology.",
"We describe a functional profiling strategy to identify and characterize subtypes of neurons present in a peripheral ganglion, which should be extendable to neurons in the CNS. In this study, dissociated dorsal-root ga... |
23218585 | Myasthenia gravis in the elderly. | The objective of the study is to examine clinical, therapeutic and prognostic factors of myasthenia gravis (MG) in the elderly.</AbstractText We reviewed all MG files of patients who attended the neuro-immunology clinic at Rabin Medical Center, Petah Tikva, Israel from January 1995 until September 2011 for demographic data, MG presentation, and course and response to treatment. Patients were classified as elderly if disease onset was above 69years.</AbstractText Out of 137 patients with MG, 29 developed MG after age 69. The 108 young onset patients had a male:female ratio of 0.9:1 whereas the eighth and ninth decade onset had a significant male predominance with ratios of 2.6:1 and 4.5:1 respectively. There was no difference in the presenting symptomatology and the rate of sero-negativity in the elderly patients when compared to the early onset patients was similar. The older patients had much less thymic pathology and their acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibody titer was lower. This was associated with better response to therapy and a good prognosis.</AbstractText MG onset in the elderly is not uncommon, is more prevalent in males, is associated with lower titer of AChR antibodies, is readily responsive to therapy and carries a good prognosis.</AbstractText | [
[
"20012068",
"Astrocytes: biology and pathology.",
"Astrocytes are specialized glial cells that outnumber neurons by over fivefold. They contiguously tile the entire central nervous system (CNS) and exert many essential complex functions in the healthy CNS. Astrocytes respond to all forms of CNS insult... | [
[
"22367250",
"A 3-dimensional digital atlas of the ascending sensory and the descending motor systems in the pigeon brain.",
"Pigeons are classic animal models for learning, memory, and cognition. The majority of the current understanding about avian neurobiology outside of the domain of the song syste... |
23262400 | Low-dose adolescent nicotine and methylphenidate have additive effects on adult behavior and neurochemistry. | Adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have higher rates of smoking than adolescents without ADHD. Since methylphenidate is the primary drug used to treat ADHD, it is likely that many adolescents are exposed to both methylphenidate and nicotine. Recent studies have established that adolescent nicotine induces long-term changes in several neurobehavioral variables. Limited data also suggest that adolescent methylphenidate may affect neural development. Nicotine tolerance is a well-established behavioral phenomenon in rodents, yet the underlying mechanism remains elusive. Recent theories suggest that changes in ventral striatal dopamine indices may relate to nicotine tolerance. As an initial determination of whether nicotine and methylphenidate have additive effects on neurobehavioral development, the present study investigated the combined effects of adolescent nicotine [2mg/kg/d] alone or in conjunction with methylphenidate [1.5mg/kg, 2× daily] following a one-month drug free period on adult behavioral tolerance to nicotine [0.5mg/kg s.c.] and its relation to dopamine receptor mRNA expression in the ventral striatum. Animals with chronic combined (nicotine+methylphenidate) adolescent exposure displayed stronger tolerance as adults to the nicotine-induced locomotor effects in comparison to animals with adolescent exposure to nicotine alone, methylphenidate alone, or controls. Combined chronic adolescent exposure significantly elevated adult D3nf mRNA expression levels in the nucleus accumbens, however a single nicotine injection in adults increased D3nf mRNA levels in naïve animals and decreased D3nf mRNA levels in those that had been previously exposed to combined stimulants during adolescence. Conversely, a single adult nicotine injection increased D1 mRNA levels in the adult nucleus accumbens, particularly in the shell, but only in rats previously exposed to nicotine or methylphenidate as adolescents. To our knowledge this is the first study that has shown long-term behavioral and neurochemical changes stemming from low chronic exposure of these two commonly co-consumed stimulants during adolescence.</AbstractText | [
[
"12584340",
"Tat-neutralizing antibodies in vaccinated macaques.",
"The human immunodeficiency virus Tat protein is essential for virus replication and is a candidate vaccine antigen. Macaques immunized with Tat or chemically modified Tat toxoid having the same clade B sequence developed strong antibo... | [
[
"23092761",
"Dreaming of mathematical neuroscience for half a century.",
"Theoreticians have been enchanted by the secrets of the brain for many years: how and why does it work so well? There has been a long history of searching for its mechanisms. Theoretical or even mathematical scientists have prop... |
23730254 | Neuronal-glial Interactions Define the Role of Nitric Oxide in Neural Functional Processes. | Nitric oxide (NO) is a versatile cellular messenger performing a variety of physiologic and pathologic actions in most tissues. It is particularly important in the nervous system, where it is involved in multiple functions, as well as in neuropathology, when produced in excess. Several of these functions are based on interactions between NO produced by neurons and NO produced by glial cells, mainly astrocytes and microglia. The present paper briefly reviews some of these interactions, in particular those involved in metabolic regulation, control of cerebral blood flow, axonogenesis, synaptic function and neurogenesis. Aim of the paper is mainly to underline the physiologic aspects of these interactions rather than the pathologic ones.</AbstractText | [
[
"10210626",
"P300 and response time from a manual Stroop task.",
"Manual response time (RT) and P300 event-related potential (ERP) measures were recorded in a Stroop color naming task to determine if previous results with vocal responses would be obtained using an arbitrary stimulus-response (S-R) map... | [
[
"23493834",
"Teaching neuroinformatics with an emphasis on quantitative locus analysis.",
"Although powerful bioinformatics tools are available for free on the web and are used by neuroscience professionals on a daily basis, neuroscience students are largely ignorant of them. This Neuroinformatics mod... |
22373615 | Perspective: Upcoming paradigm shifts for psychiatry in clinical care, research, and education. | Psychiatry is facing a crisis fueled by a fragmented and inefficient system of care delivery and a disconnection between the state of research and the state of psychiatry education and practice. Many factors contribute to the current state of psychiatric care. Psychiatry is a shortage specialty, and this will become worse in the near future. In addition, financial pressures have led to decreases in psychiatric inpatient and outpatient services and to shorter lengths of hospitalization for even the sickest patients. This has resulted in fragmented care and an overreliance on polypharmacy. To reach the large number of patients needing psychiatric services, health care systems must change and take advantage of collaborative and integrative care models and new technologies. Psychiatrists must learn to partner more effectively with primary care providers to extend their expertise to the greatest number of patients. Currently, psychiatric diagnosis is based on a criteria-based system that was developed in the 1970s. Advances in systems and molecular neuroscience are beginning to elucidate specific brain systems that are dysfunctional in psychiatric illness. This has the potential to revolutionize psychiatric diagnosis and treatment in the future. However, psychiatry has not yet been successful in incorporating the language of this research into clinically meaningful terminology. If neuroscientific progress is to be translated into clinical advances, this must change. Residency programs must better prepare their graduates to keep up with a psychiatry literature that will increasingly use the language of neural circuits to describe psychiatric symptomatology and treatments.</AbstractText | [
[
"11330208",
"Microdialysis perfusion of orexin-A in the basal forebrain increases wakefulness in freely behaving rats.",
"Recent work indicates that the orexin/hypocretin-containing neurons of the lateral hypothalamus are involved in control of REM sleep phenomena, but site-specific actions in control... | [
[
"22305544",
"[Methodology of neuroepidemiological studies in tropical countries: a challenge?].",
"The purpose of this paper is to highlight the difficulties of applying neuroepidemiological methods in low income countries or developing countries, which are mostly tropical countries, taking advantage ... |
22155385 | Metabotropic glutamate receptor 1 (mGluR1): antibody specificity and receptor expression in cultured primary neurons. | The availability of high quality, well-characterized antibodies for molecular and cellular neuroscience studies is important. However, not all available antibodies are rigorously evaluated, nor are limitations of particular antibodies often reported. We have examined a panel of currently available mGluR1 antibodies and have identified which ones are selective for use by western blots and immunocytochemistry. We have also specifically determined whether the antibodies cross-react to recognize mGluR5, by examining (1) tissue from both mGluR1 and mGluR5 knock-out mice and (2) primary cortical cultures, in which mGluR5 is widely expressed but mGluR1 is not. Together, these data provide a baseline characterization of antibodies that can and cannot be reliably used in these types of studies, and will hopefully facilitate and positively impact the research efforts of others studying mGluR1.</AbstractText | [
[
"15996748",
"Correlates of trait impulsiveness in performance measures and neuropsychological tests.",
"Performance measures of impulsiveness offer great promise for assessing this trait in clinical and experimental studies. However, little is known about their relative superiority or inferiority to s... | [
[
"22431838",
"The brighter side of music in dystonia.",
"To report a patient with genetically proven DYT1 dystonia who shows dramatic improvement in symptoms while playing the piano.</AbstractText Case study.</AbstractText Sobell Department for Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, Institute of Ne... |
23053864 | Estimating summary statistics in the spike-train space. | Estimating sample averages and sample variability is important in analyzing neural spike trains data in computational neuroscience. Current approaches have focused on advancing the use of parametric or semiparametric probability models of the underlying stochastic process, where the probabilistic distribution is characterized at each time point with basic statistics such as mean and variance. To directly capture and analyze the average and variability in the observation space of the spike trains, we focus on a data-driven approach where statistics are defined and computed in a function space in which the spike trains are viewed as individual points. Based on the definition of a "Euclidean" metric, a recent paper introduced the notion of the mean of a set of spike trains and developed an efficient algorithm to compute it under some restrictive conditions. Here we extend this study by: (1) developing a novel algorithm for mean computation that is quite general, and (2) introducing a notion of covariance of a set of spike trains. Specifically, we estimate the covariance matrix using the geometry of the warping functions that map the mean spike train to each of the spike trains in the dataset. Results from simulations as well as a neural recording in primate motor cortex indicate that the proposed mean and covariance successfully capture the observed variability in spike trains. In addition, a "Gaussian-type" probability model (defined using the estimated mean and covariance) reasonably characterizes the distribution of the spike trains and achieves a desirable performance in the classification of the spike trains.</AbstractText | [
[
"21391760",
"The default network distinguishes construals of proximal versus distal events.",
"Humans enjoy a singular capacity to imagine events that differ from the \"here-and-now.\" Recent cognitive neuroscience research has linked such simulation processes to the brain's \"default network.\" Howev... | [
[
"23218585",
"Myasthenia gravis in the elderly.",
"The objective of the study is to examine clinical, therapeutic and prognostic factors of myasthenia gravis (MG) in the elderly.</AbstractText We reviewed all MG files of patients who attended the neuro-immunology clinic at Rabin Medical Center, Petah T... |
23316177 | Affective neuronal selection: the nature of the primordial emotion systems. | Based on studies in affective neuroscience and evolutionary psychiatry, a tentative new proposal is made here as to the nature and identification of primordial emotional systems. Our model stresses phylogenetic origins of emotional systems, which we believe is necessary for a full understanding of the functions of emotions and additionally suggests that emotional organizing systems play a role in sculpting the brain during ontogeny. Nascent emotional systems thus affect cognitive development. A second proposal concerns two additions to the affective systems identified by Panksepp. We suggest there is substantial evidence for a primary emotional organizing program dealing with power, rank, dominance, and subordination which instantiates competitive and territorial behavior and is an evolutionary contributor to self-esteem in humans. A program underlying disgust reactions which originally functioned in ancient vertebrates to protect against infection and toxins is also suggested.</AbstractText | [
[
"11144366",
"Ensemble patterns of hippocampal CA3-CA1 neurons during sharp wave-associated population events.",
"Transfer of neuronal patterns from the CA3 to CA1 region was studied by simultaneous recording of neuronal ensembles in the behaving rat. A nonlinear interaction among pyramidal neurons was... | [
[
"22328183",
"Towards a closed-loop cochlear implant system: application of embedded monitoring of peripheral and central neural activity.",
"Although the cochlear implant (CI) is widely considered the most successful neural prosthesis, it is essentially an open-loop system that requires extensive init... |
30123682 | Neurotoxicology: Five new things. | Neurotoxic disease can mimic many common neurologic disease states, including parkinsonism, myelopathy, neuropathy, and encephalopathy. Accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment may result in a favorable outcome. This review highlights 5 areas of neurotoxicology for which there is an emerging understanding of disease processes or patterns of exposure, including 3 specific metal toxicities (manganism, zinc-induced copper deficiency, and cobalt-chromium neuropathy). Toxin-induced posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome is more widely recognized and reported in association with an ever-growing list of drugs. Two new categories of street drugs, synthetic cathinones and cannabinoids, have been identified as public health threats due to their popularity, availability, and severity of toxicity.</AbstractText | [
[
"15050709",
"Tactile discrimination activates the visual cortex of the recently blind naive to Braille: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in humans.",
"The occipital cortex of blind subjects is known to be activated during tactile discrimination tasks such as Braille reading. To investigat... | [
[
"22963990",
"Further characterization of repetitive behavior in C58 mice: developmental trajectory and effects of environmental enrichment.",
"Aberrant repetitive behaviors are commonly observed in a variety of neurodevelopmental, neurological, and neuropsychiatric disorders. Little is known about the... |
23206683 | Optogenetic neuromodulation. | The recent development of optogenetics, a revolutionary research tool in neuroscience, portends an evolution of current clinical neuromodulation tools. A form of gene therapy, optogenetics makes possible highly precise spatial and temporal control of specific neuronal populations. This technique has already provided several new insights relevant to clinical neuroscience, from the physiological substrate of functional magnetic resonance imaging to the mechanism of deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease. The increased precision of optogenetic techniques also raises the possibility of eventual human use. Translational efforts have begun in primates, with success reported from multiple labs in rhesus macaques. These developments will remain of ongoing interest to neurologists and neurosurgeons.</AbstractText | [
[
"20800054",
"Kisspeptins: bridging energy homeostasis and reproduction.",
"Body energy reserves and metabolic state are relevant modifiers of puberty onset and fertility; forms of metabolic stress ranging from persistent energy insufficiency to morbid obesity are frequently linked to reproductive diso... | [
[
"23029114",
"Monitoring performance degradation of cerebellar functions using computational neuroscience methods: implications on neurological diseases.",
"Neurodegeneration is a major cause of human disease. Within the cerebellum, neuronal degeneration and/or dysfunction has been associated with many... |
22431838 | The brighter side of music in dystonia. | To report a patient with genetically proven DYT1 dystonia who shows dramatic improvement in symptoms while playing the piano.</AbstractText Case study.</AbstractText Sobell Department for Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, Institute of Neurology, University College London, England.</AbstractText A 49-year-old right-handed male civil servant.</AbstractText The patient was videotaped, and electromyographic activity was recorded from the splenius capitis, sternocleidomastoid, and orbicularis oculi muscles, while he was (1) at rest, (2) playing an electric piano with auditory feedback, and (3) playing an electric piano without auditory feedback (ie, when the sound of the piano is turned off).</AbstractText At baseline, the patient had generalized dystonia with prominent upper limb, neck, and facial involvement. While he was playing the piano, there was an instant and almost complete improvement in dystonia symptoms. The improvement was also noticeable when he played the piano without auditory feedback. There was a significant reduction in electromyographic activity for all recorded muscles when he played the piano, compared with his baseline electromyographic activity.</AbstractText This is a unique case of “paradoxical” improvement in dystonia symptoms with activity (ie, playing a piano), in contrast to the typical worsening of dystonia symptoms with activity. We discuss the possible mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. One of the most intriguing features of primary dystonia is the variability of abnormal muscle activity relative to the context in which movement is attempted (eg, the exquisite task specificity of focal hand dystonia or the phenomenon of the geste antagoniste). We present a unique case of an amateur pianist with genetically proven DYT1 dystonia who shows dramatic improvement in generalized dystonia symptoms while playing piano.</AbstractText | [
[
"21723668",
"Steroid sulfatase-deficient mice exhibit endophenotypes relevant to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.",
"Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition characterised by inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity; it is frequently co-morbid... | [
[
"21861199",
"Optimal experimental design for sampling voltage on dendritic trees in the low-SNR regime.",
"Due to the limitations of current voltage sensing techniques, optimal filtering of noisy, undersampled voltage signals on dendritic trees is a key problem in computational cellular neuroscience. ... |
20425240 | Advances in pediatric neurovirology. | Viral infections of the pediatric central nervous system (CNS) encompass a broad spectrum of both perinatally and postnatally acquired diseases with potentially devastating effects on the developing brain. In children, viral infections have been associated with chronic encephalopathy, encephalitis, demyelinating disease, tumors, and epilepsy. Older diagnostic techniques of biopsy, viral culture, electron microscopy, gel-based polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and viral titer quantification are being replaced with more rapid, sensitive, and specific real-time and microarray-based PCR technologies. Advances in neuroimaging technologies have provided for earlier recognition of CNS injury without elucidation of specific viral etiology. Although the mainstay therapy of many pediatric neurovirologic diseases, aside from HIV, includes intravenous acyclovir, much work is being done to develop novel antiviral immunotherapies aimed at both treating and preventing pediatric CNS viral disease.</AbstractText | [
[
"21325527",
"Emergence of learned categorical representations within an auditory forebrain circuit.",
"Many learned behaviors are thought to require the activity of high-level neurons that represent categories of complex signals, such as familiar faces or native speech sounds. How these complex, exper... | [
[
"20797539",
"Spatiotemporal response properties of optic-flow processing neurons.",
"A central goal in sensory neuroscience is to fully characterize a neuron's input-output relation. However, strong nonlinearities in the responses of sensory neurons have made it difficult to develop models that genera... |
23231650 | Dissociable brain signatures of choice conflict and immediate reward preferences in alcohol use disorders. | Impulsive delayed reward discounting (DRD) is an important behavioral process in alcohol use disorders (AUDs), reflecting incapacity to delay gratification. Recent work in neuroeconomics has begun to unravel the neural mechanisms supporting DRD, but applications of neuroeconomics in relation to AUDs have been limited. This study examined the neural mechanisms of DRD preferences in AUDs, with emphasis on dissociating activation patterns based on DRD choice type and level of cognitive conflict. Heavy drinking adult men with (n = 13) and without (n = 12) a diagnosis of an AUD completed a monetary DRD task during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Participant responses were coded based on choice type (impulsive versus restrained) and level of cognitive conflict (easy versus hard). AUD+ participants exhibited significantly more impulsive DRD decision-making. Significant activation during DRD was found in several decision-making regions, including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), insula, posterior parietal cortex (PPC), and posterior cingulate. An axis of cognitive conflict was also observed, with hard choices associated with anterior cingulate cortex and easy choices associated with activation in supplementary motor area. AUD+ individuals exhibited significant hyperactivity in regions associated with cognitive control (DLPFC) and prospective thought (PPC) and exhibited less task-related deactivation of areas associated with the brain's default network during DRD decisions. This study provides further clarification of the brain systems supporting DRD in general and in relation to AUDs.</AbstractText | [
[
"19005051",
"Light-induced rescue of breathing after spinal cord injury.",
"Paralysis is a major consequence of spinal cord injury (SCI). After cervical SCI, respiratory deficits can result through interruption of descending presynaptic inputs to respiratory motor neurons in the spinal cord. Expressio... | [
[
"25103077",
"Clinical and electrophysiologic features of childhood Guillain-Barré syndrome in Northeast China.",
"Since little has been reported in previous studies, we aimed to find the clinical and electrophysiologic characteristics associated with childhood Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) in Nor... |
20530254 | Sensitivity and selectivity of neurons in auditory cortex to the pitch, timbre, and location of sounds. | We are able to rapidly recognize and localize the many sounds in our environment. We can describe any of these sounds in terms of various independent "features" such as their loudness, pitch, or position in space. However, we still know surprisingly little about how neurons in the auditory brain, specifically the auditory cortex, might form representations of these perceptual characteristics from the information that the ear provides about sound acoustics. In this article, the authors examine evidence that the auditory cortex is necessary for processing the pitch, timbre, and location of sounds, and document how neurons across multiple auditory cortical fields might represent these as trains of action potentials. They conclude by asking whether neurons in different regions of the auditory cortex might not be simply sensitive to each of these three sound features but whether they might be selective for one of them. The few studies that have examined neural sensitivity to multiple sound attributes provide only limited support for neural selectivity within auditory cortex. Providing an explanation of the neural basis of feature invariance is thus one of the major challenges to sensory neuroscience obtaining the ultimate goal of understanding how neural firing patterns in the brain give rise to perception.</AbstractText | [
[
"3316677",
"Psychoneuroimmunology: interactions between central nervous system and immune system.",
"Psychoneuroimmunology, a rapidly developing field, has to do with the complex bidirectional interactions between the central nervous system and the immune system. Neuroendocrine influences modulate imm... | [
[
"20953339",
"Sign Languages: Contribution to Neurolinguistics from Cross-Modal Research.",
"Using sign language research as an example, we argue that both the cross-linguistic descriptive approach to data, advocated by Evans and Levinson (2009), as well as abstract ('formal') analyses are necessary st... |
23210812 | Researchers and the translational reality. Interview with Karen Aboody. | Karen Aboody has first-hand experience of taking a potential therapy from the laboratory into clinical trials. Here, she shares with us the challenges and rewards of going from bench to bedside, and why all biomedical researchers need to know what it takes to make the transition if they want the best chance of seeing their discoveries used to help patients. Karen Aboody received her MD at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and completed her post-doctoral training in Molecular Neurogenetics at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. After gaining experience in pathology, gene therapy and biotechnology, she joined City of Hope (COH) in 2003 to head a translational research laboratory focused on therapeutic stem cell applications for invasive and metastatic solid tumors. In 2010, she received US FDA approval for a first-in-human clinical trial for neural stem cell-mediated therapy for high-grade glioma patients. This Phase I study is ongoing at COH, supported by NCI/NIH funding. In 2010, she received an US$18 million California Institute of Regenerative Medicine Disease Team Award to develop a second-generation enzyme/prodrug stem cell-mediated brain tumor therapy for clinical trials that may also have applications for other metastatic cancers. Honors include the 2000 AANS Young Investigator Award, and 2008 ASGCT Outstanding New Investigator Award. She recently founded a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, TheraBiologics Inc., to support clinical development of neural stem cell-mediated cancer therapies.</AbstractText | [
[
"3272153",
"Cellular determination in the Xenopus retina is independent of lineage and birth date.",
"Xenopus embryos injected with tritiated thymidine throughout the stages of embryonic retinal neurogenesis showed that more than 95% of the embryonic retinal cells are born within a 25 hr period. While... | [
[
"22936912",
"Decoding semantics across fMRI sessions with different stimulus modalities: a practical MVPA study.",
"Both embodied and symbolic accounts of conceptual organization would predict partial sharing and partial differentiation between the neural activations seen for concepts activated via di... |
23269439 | The p.Ala510Val mutation in the SPG7 (paraplegin) gene is the most common mutation causing adult onset neurogenetic disease in patients of British ancestry. | The c.1529C >T change in the SPG7 gene, encoding the mutant p.Ala510Val paraplegin protein, was first described as a polymorphism in 1998. This was based on its frequency of 3 % and 4 % in two separate surveys of controls in the United Kingdom (UK) population. Subsequently, it has been found to co-segregate with disease in a number of different populations. Yeast expression studies support its having a deleterious effect. In this paper a consanguineous sibship is described in which four members who are homozygous for the p.Ala510Val variant present with a spectrum of disease. This spectrum encompasses moderately severe hereditary spastic paraparesis (HSP) with more minor ataxia in two siblings, moderately severe ataxia without spasticity in the third, and a very mild gait ataxia in the fourth. Two of the siblings also manifest vestibular failure. The remaining eight unaffected siblings are either heterozygous for the p.Ala510Val variant, or do not carry it at all. Homozygosity mapping using a high-density SNP array across the whole genome found just 11 genes (on two regions of chromosome 3) outside the SPG7 region on chromosome 16, which were homozygously shared by the affected siblings, but not shared by the unaffected siblings; none of them are likely to be causative. The weight of evidence is strongly in favour of the p.Ala510Val variant being a disease-causing mutation. We present additional data from the Auckland City Hospital neurogenetics clinic to show that the p.Ala510Val mutation is prevalent amongst HSP patients of UK extraction belying any suggestion that European p.Ala510Val haplotypes harbour a disease-causing mutation which the UK p.Ala510Val haplotypes do not. Taken together with previous findings of a carrier frequency of 3-4 % in the UK population (giving a homozygosity rate of 20-40/100,000), the data imply that the p.Ala510Val is the most common mutation causing neurogenetic disease in adults of UK ancestry, albeit the penetrance may be low or the disease caused may be mild.</AbstractText | [
[
"9892252",
"A placebo-controlled trial of D-cycloserine added to conventional neuroleptics in patients with schizophrenia.",
"In a preliminary dose-finding study, D-cycloserine, a partial agonist at the glycine modulatory site of the glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor, improved negativ... | [
[
"22998948",
"Glucocorticoid excess and the developmental origins of disease: two decades of testing the hypothesis--2012 Curt Richter Award Winner.",
"Low birthweight, a marker of an adverse in utero environment, is associated with cardiometabolic disease and brain disorders in adulthood. The adaptive... |
23908850 | Cognitive decline and dementia in the oldest-old. | The oldest-old are the fastest growing segment of the Western population. Over half of the oldest-old will have dementia, but the etiology is yet unknown. Age is the only risk factor consistently associated with dementia in the oldest-old. Many of the risk and protective factors for dementia in the young elderly, such as ApoE genotype, physical activity, and healthy lifestyle, are not relevant for the oldest-old. Neuropathology is abundant in the oldest-old brains, but specific pathologies of Alzheimer's disease (AD) or vascular dementia are not necessarily correlated with cognition, as in younger persons. It has been suggested that accumulation of both AD-like and vascular pathologies, loss of synaptic proteins, and neuronal loss contribute to the cognitive decline observed in the oldest-old. Several characteristics of the oldest-old may confound the diagnosis of dementia in this age group. A gradual age-related cognitive decline, particularly in executive function and mental speed, is evident even in non-demented oldest-old. Hearing and vision losses, which are also prevalent in the oldest-old and found in some cases to precede/predict cognitive decline, may mechanically interfere in neuropsychological evaluations. Difficulties in carrying out everyday activities, observed in the majority of the oldest-old, may be the result of motor or physical dysfunction and of neurodegenerative processes. The oldest-old appear to be a select population, who escapes major illnesses or delays their onset and duration toward the end of life. Dementia in the oldest-old may be manifested when a substantial amount of pathology is accumulated, or with a composition of a variety of pathologies. Investigating the clinical and pathological features of dementia in the oldest-old is of great importance in order to develop therapeutic strategies and to provide the most elderly of our population with good quality of life.</AbstractText | [
[
"22708717",
"No evidence of intelligence improvement after working memory training: a randomized, placebo-controlled study.",
"Numerous recent studies seem to provide evidence for the general intellectual benefits of working memory training. In reviews of the training literature, Shipstead, Redick, an... | [
[
"23181011",
"Neuronal function is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness: consciousness is necessary for will.",
"Behavioral neuroscience has presented philosophers with the task of clarifying the relationship between neural determinism and free will. If neural functions encode information and... |
23261499 | Neurochemical profiles of some novel psychoactive substances. | Fourteen substances from the class of drugs sometimes known as "legal highs" were screened against a battery of human receptors in binding assays, and their potencies as inhibitors of monoamine uptake determined in functional in vitro assays. Thirteen of the test substances acted as inhibitors of monoamine uptake at submicromolar concentrations, including 9 potent inhibitors of the dopamine transporter (DAT), 12 potent inhibitors of the norepinephrine transporter (NET) and 4 potent inhibitors of the serotonin transporter (SERT). Seven compounds acted as submicromolar inhibitors of both DAT and NET, and three substances 1-(benzofuran-5-yl)propan-2-amine (5-APB), 1-naphthalen-2-yl-2-pyrrolidin-1-ylpentan-1-one hydrochloride ("naphyrone") and 1-naphthalen-1-yl-2-pyrrolidin-1-ylpentan-1-one hydrochloride ("1-naphyrone") were submicromolar inhibitors of all three monoamine transporters. There was a lack of correlation between results of functional uptake experiments and in vitro binding assays for the monoamine transporters. There was also no correlation between the human behavioral effects of the substances and the results of bindings assays for a range of receptor targets, although 1-(benzofuran-5-yl)propan-2-amine (5-APB), 1-(benzofuran-6-yl)propan-2-amine hydrochloride (6-APB) and 5-iodo-2,3-dihydro-1H-inden-2-amine hydrochloride (5-iodo-aminoindane) exhibited <100 nM affinities for 5HT(2B) and α(2C) receptors. Functional assays revealed that 5-APB and 6-APB were potent full agonists at 5HT(2B) receptors.</AbstractText | [
[
"18773078",
"Spleen vagal denervation inhibits the production of antibodies to circulating antigens.",
"Recently the vagal output of the central nervous system has been shown to suppress the innate immune defense to pathogens. Here we investigated by anatomical and physiological techniques the communi... | [
[
"23200550",
"Next generation sequencing for neurological diseases: new hope or new hype?",
"Over the past year huge advances have been made in our ability to determine the genetic aetiology of many neurological diseases through the utilisation of next generation sequencing platforms. This technology i... |
23226123 | Identifying temporal and causal contributions of neural processes underlying the Implicit Association Test (IAT). | The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular behavioral measure that assesses the associative strength between outgroup members and stereotypical and counterstereotypical traits. Less is known, however, about the degree to which the IAT reflects automatic processing. Two studies examined automatic processing contributions to a gender-IAT using a data driven, social neuroscience approach. Performance on congruent (e.g., categorizing male names with synonyms of strength) and incongruent (e.g., categorizing female names with synonyms of strength) IAT blocks were separately analyzed using EEG (event-related potentials, or ERPs, and coherence; Study 1) and lesion (Study 2) methodologies. Compared to incongruent blocks, performance on congruent IAT blocks was associated with more positive ERPs that manifested in frontal and occipital regions at automatic processing speeds, occipital regions at more controlled processing speeds and was compromised by volume loss in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), insula and medial PFC. Performance on incongruent blocks was associated with volume loss in supplementary motor areas, cingulate gyrus and a region in medial PFC similar to that found for congruent blocks. Greater coherence was found between frontal and occipital regions to the extent individuals exhibited more bias. This suggests there are separable neural contributions to congruent and incongruent blocks of the IAT but there is also a surprising amount of overlap. Given the temporal and regional neural distinctions, these results provide converging evidence that stereotypic associative strength assessed by the IAT indexes automatic processing to a degree.</AbstractText | [
[
"17691351",
"An introduction to operative neuromodulation and functional neuroprosthetics, the new frontiers of clinical neuroscience and biotechnology.",
"Operative neuromodulation is the field of altering electrically or chemically the signal transmission in the nervous system by implanted devices i... | [
[
"23286166",
"Group-wise consistent fiber clustering based on multimodal connectional and functional profiles.",
"Fiber clustering is an essential step towards brain connectivity modeling and tract-based analysis of white matter integrity via diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in many clinical neuroscience... |
22794533 | Infusing developmental neuroscience into school-based preventive interventions: implications and future directions. | Recent advances in developmental neuroscience have the potential to significantly impact the behavioral and academic outcomes of adolescents. By adopting a translational approach, we aim to promote the transfer of knowledge related to neurological, cognitive, and emotion regulatory factors that underlie youth's ability to respond to educational and prevention programming.</AbstractText This article synthesizes basic and applied research from the field of developmental neuroscience to highlight the significance of this work for the creation, evaluation, and tailoring of school-based preventive interventions designed to address aggressive behavior problems. We draw on research related to stress, social-cognitive factors, emotional perception and regulation, and executive functioning to identify potential neurodevelopmental mediators and moderators of prevention program impacts.</AbstractText Findings suggest that a high level of brain plasticity characterizes early childhood and adolescent stages of development, providing optimal windows of opportunity for intervention. The available research emphasizes the importance of executive functioning and related emotional regulatory factors as potential mechanisms for change in educational and risk prevention models.</AbstractText Neuroscience research provides insights into underlying mechanisms that, when appropriately targeted, can help optimize the impact of social-emotional learning curricula. Recommendations are made for how to apply relevant findings from neuroscience and related disciplines to improve behavioral and academic outcomes for school-aged youth. Additional research areas are identified to inform the creation of neurodevelopmentally sensitive preventive interventions targeting aggressive behavior problems which, in turn, are expected to affect academic outcomes.</AbstractText | [
[
"19874855",
"Species differences in group size and electrosensory interference in weakly electric fishes: implications for electrosensory processing.",
"In animals with active sensory systems, group size can have dramatic effects on the sensory information available to individuals. In \"wave-type\" we... | [
[
"23439731",
"Cerebellar pathology of a dual clinical diagnosis: patients with essential tremor and dystonia.",
"Clinical studies have implicated the cerebellum in the pathogenesis of essential tremor (ET), and recent postmortem studies have identified structural changes in the ET cerebellum. While the... |
23366259 | Design of the multi-channel electroencephalography-based brain-computer interface with novel dry sensors. | The traditional brain-computer interface (BCI) system measures the electroencephalography (EEG) signals by the wet sensors with the conductive gel and skin preparation processes. To overcome the limitations of traditional BCI system with conventional wet sensors, a wireless and wearable multi-channel EEG-based BCI system is proposed in this study, including the wireless EEG data acquisition device, dry spring-loaded sensors, a size-adjustable soft cap. The dry spring-loaded sensors are made of metal conductors, which can measure the EEG signals without skin preparation and conductive gel. In addition, the proposed system provides a size-adjustable soft cap that can be used to fit user's head properly. Indeed, the results are shown that the proposed system can properly and effectively measure the EEG signals with the developed cap and sensors, even under movement. In words, the developed wireless and wearable BCI system is able to be used in cognitive neuroscience applications.</AbstractText | [
[
"19064491",
"Retention of high tactile acuity throughout the life span in blindness.",
"Previous studies of tactile acuity on the fingertip, using passive touch, have demonstrated an age-related decline in spatial resolution for both sighted and blind subjects. We have reexamined this age dependence w... | [
[
"23060781",
"Using \"smart stimulators\" to treat Parkinson's disease: re-engineering neurostimulation devices.",
"Let's imagine the cruise control of your car locked at 120 km/h on any road in any condition (city, country, highway, sunny or rainy weather), or your car air conditioner set on ma... |
21840408 | Modulating the brain at work using noninvasive transcranial stimulation. | This paper proposes a shift in the way researchers currently view and use transcranial brain stimulation technologies. From a neuroscience perspective, the standard application of both transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been mainly to explore the function of various brain regions. These tools allow for noninvasive and painless modulation of cortical tissue. In the course of studying the function of an area, many studies often report enhanced performance of a task during or following the stimulation. However, little follow-up research is typically done to further explore these effects. Approaching this growing pool of cognitive neuroscience literature with a neuroergonomics mindset (i.e., studying the brain at work), the possibilities of using these stimulation techniques for more than simply investigating the function of cortical areas become evident. In this paper, we discuss how cognitive neuroscience brain stimulation studies may complement neuroergonomics research on human performance optimization. And, through this discussion, we hope to shift the mindset of viewing transcranial stimulation techniques as solely investigatory basic science tools or possible clinical therapeutic devices to viewing transcranial stimulation techniques as interventional tools to be incorporated in applied science research and systems for the augmentation and enhancement of human operator performance.</AbstractText | [
[
"19298949",
"Perceptual simulation in conceptual combination: evidence from property generation.",
"In three experiments, participants received nouns or noun phrases for objects and verbally generated their properties (\"feature listing\"). Several sources of evidence indicated that participants const... | [
[
"23029114",
"Monitoring performance degradation of cerebellar functions using computational neuroscience methods: implications on neurological diseases.",
"Neurodegeneration is a major cause of human disease. Within the cerebellum, neuronal degeneration and/or dysfunction has been associated with many... |
22969712 | Neural systems supporting cognitive-affective interactions in adolescence: the role of puberty and implications for affective disorders. | Evidence from longitudinal studies suggests that adolescence may represent a period of vulnerability that, in the context of adverse events, could contribute to developmental trajectories toward behavioral and emotional health problems, including affective disorders. Adolescence is also a sensitive period for the development of neural systems supporting cognitive-affective processes, which have been implicated in the pathophysiology of affective disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders. In particular, the onset of puberty brings about a cascade of physical, hormonal, psychological, and social changes that contribute in complex ways to the development of these systems. This article provides a brief overview of neuroimaging research pertaining to the development of cognitive-affective processes in adolescence. It also includes a brief review of evidence from animal and human neuroimaging studies suggesting that sex steroids influence the connectivity between prefrontal cortical and subcortical limbic regions in ways that contribute to increased reactivity to emotionally salient stimuli. We integrate these findings in the context of a developmental affective neuroscience framework suggesting that the impact of rising levels of sex steroids during puberty on fronto-limbic connectivity may be even greater in the context of protracted development of prefrontal cortical regions in adolescence. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for future research aimed at identifying neurodevelopmental markers of risk for future onset of affective disorders.</AbstractText | [
[
"21677369",
"A cortical neural prosthesis for restoring and enhancing memory.",
"A primary objective in developing a neural prosthesis is to replace neural circuitry in the brain that no longer functions appropriately. Such a goal requires artificial reconstruction of neuron-to-neuron connections in a... | [
[
"22344946",
"Answering the big questions in neuroscience: DoD's experimental research wing takes on massive, high-risk projects.",
"When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) asks research questions, it goes big. This is, after all, the same agency that put together teams of scientists... |
23129998 | Supercomputers ready for use as discovery machines for neuroscience. | NEST is a widely used tool to simulate biological spiking neural networks. Here we explain the improvements, guided by a mathematical model of memory consumption, that enable us to exploit for the first time the computational power of the K supercomputer for neuroscience. Multi-threaded components for wiring and simulation combine 8 cores per MPI process to achieve excellent scaling. K is capable of simulating networks corresponding to a brain area with 10(8) neurons and 10(12) synapses in the worst case scenario of random connectivity; for larger networks of the brain its hierarchical organization can be exploited to constrain the number of communicating computer nodes. We discuss the limits of the software technology, comparing maximum filling scaling plots for K and the JUGENE BG/P system. The usability of these machines for network simulations has become comparable to running simulations on a single PC. Turn-around times in the range of minutes even for the largest systems enable a quasi interactive working style and render simulations on this scale a practical tool for computational neuroscience.</AbstractText | [
[
"21386006",
"Optogenetics in the teaching laboratory: using channelrhodopsin-2 to study the neural basis of behavior and synaptic physiology in Drosophila.",
"Here we incorporate recent advances in Drosophila neurogenetics and \"optogenetics\" into neuroscience laboratory exercises. We used the light-... | [
[
"23391878",
"The dialectical law between coronary artery disease and stroke recurrence.",
"In this issue of Neuroendocrinology Letters Kováčik et al. reported that coronary artery disease is not associated with stroke recurrence. Although the data were analyzed by statistical methods and th... |
22946114 | Giuseppe Ferrario and the epidemiology of apoplexy during the 19th century. | To analyze the pioneering research of Giuseppe Ferrario (1802-1870) on the epidemiology of apoplexy. To our knowledge, his work might have been the first to systematically investigate the epidemiology of cerebrovascular accidents, with the aim of shedding light on the underlying causes.</AbstractText A detailed analysis of the essay "Statistics of sudden deaths, more particularly of deaths from apoplexy, in the city and neighborhood of Milan, from 1750 to 1834," published by Ferrario in 1834.</AbstractText Ferrario conducted a large retrospective study on 13,360 people who died from apoplexy during an 84-year observational period. Analyzed data showed that these events were more frequent among men and during winter. Apoplexy was reported as mainly occurring at the age of 60; an increase in mortality was observed in young women aged between 21 and 30 years, probably due to an abuse of bloodletting. Ferrario introduced the term "hereditary apoplexy," being one of the first to hypothesize hereditary components in cerebrovascular diseases. He also tried to investigate the role of social conditions in the etiopathogenesis of these events, analyzing marital and employment status and suggesting to his colleagues that cultural and economic factors should be further examined.</AbstractText Giuseppe Ferrario may be considered as a pioneer of modern science and epidemiology and his work deserves consideration within the history of neurology and of neuroepidemiology.</AbstractText | [
[
"19120115",
"Chronic stress, combined with a high-fat/high-sugar diet, shifts sympathetic signaling toward neuropeptide Y and leads to obesity and the metabolic syndrome.",
"In response to stress, some people lose while others gain weight. This is believed to be due to either increased beta-adrenergic... | [
[
"23383397",
"Interactions between oestrogen and the renin angiotensin system - potential mechanisms for gender differences in Alzheimer's disease.",
"Interactions between oestrogen and the renin angiotensin system (RAS) are reviewed and explored from the perspective where these interactions may modula... |
25205899 | Neuroepidemiology of epilepsy in northwest India. | Epilepsy has a complex etiology characterised by recurring seizures.</AbstractText To study clinical profile of epilepsy patients with reference to type of epilepsy in northwest India. No previous Indian study has reported relative incidence of various types of seizures with reference to type of epilepsy.</AbstractText Data of 400 epilepsy patients (200 idiopathic and 200 symptomatic) was collected for their clinical characteristics. The classification of epilepsy into idiopathic and symptomatic types was done on the basis of findings of EEG, CT scan and MRI tests.</AbstractText The age of onset of seizures was less than 15 years in only one third of the total patients. The number of non-vegetarians was higher in SE (68.5%) than IE (58%). The male to female ratio was significantly higher (1.33:1 in IE and 1.47:1 in SE). No difference was seen for place of residence (urban vs rural) patients with epilepsy (PWE). The majority of patients (58.5% of symptomatic and 52.8% idiopathic) though reported no triggering factors, yet many of them, when questioned, had held supernatural powers to be the cause of the disease. Sleep deprivation was reported as a major triggering factor by 28.5% of idiopathic epilepsy (IE) and 25% of symptomatic epilepsy (SE) patients. The incidence of mental retardation (1.25%) and behavioral disorders (7%) was found to be relatively low. Loss of memory was reported in 46% of IE and 43.5% of SE and poor scholastic performance in 23% of IE and 16.5% of SE. A positive history was recorded in 11% first-degree relatives and 4% second-degree relatives. Generalized seizures were more common in IE patients (67.5%), while partial seizures with and without secondary generalization (50.5%), and generalized seizures (49.5%) were equally common in SE.</AbstractText The study demonstrates differences in the type of seizures between idiopathic and symptomatic epilepsies and not other demographic, clinical and psycho-social traits. The males were found to have higher risk of epilepsy than females. The epidemiological characteristics of epileptics show variations across populations and also within population.</AbstractText Hyperornithinemia-hyperammonemia-homocitrullinuria (HHH) syndrome is a disorder of the urea cycle and ornithine degradation pathway. Clinical manifestations and age of onset vary among individuals even in the same family. <i The biochemical diagnosis of HHH syndrome is established in a proband with the classic metabolic triad of episodic or postprandial hyperammonemia, persistent hyperornithinemia, and urinary excretion of homocitrulline. The molecular diagnosis of HHH syndrome is established in a symptomatic individual with or without suggestive metabolic/biochemical findings by identification of biallelic pathogenic variants in <i <i HHH syndrome is inherited in an autosomal recessive manner. At conception, each sib of an affected individual has a 25% chance of being affected, a 50% chance of being an asymptomatic carrier, and a 25% chance of being unaffected and not a carrier. Once the <i | [
[
"21466746",
"Study on the possible association of brain-derived neurotrophic factor polymorphism with the developmental course of symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity.",
"Several studies have, with conflicting results, investigated the relationship between the Val⁶⁶Met polymor... | [
[
"20425240",
"Advances in pediatric neurovirology.",
"Viral infections of the pediatric central nervous system (CNS) encompass a broad spectrum of both perinatally and postnatally acquired diseases with potentially devastating effects on the developing brain. In children, viral infections have been ass... |
22365959 | Defining the genetic architecture of human developmental language impairment. | Language is a uniquely human trait, which poses limitations on animal models for discovering biological substrates and pathways. Despite this challenge, rapidly developing biotechnology in the field of genomics has made human genetics studies a viable alternative route for defining the molecular neuroscience of human language. This is accomplished by studying families that transmit both normal and disordered language across generations. The language disorder reviewed here is specific language impairment (SLI), a developmental deficiency in language acquisition despite adequate opportunity, normal intelligence, and without any apparent neurological etiology. Here, we describe disease gene discovery paradigms as applied to SLI families and review the progress this field has made. After review the evidence that genetic factors influence SLI, we discuss methods and findings from scans of the human chromosomes, including the main replicated regions on chromosomes 13, 16 and 19 and two identified genes, ATP2C2 and CMIP that appear to account for the language variation on chromosome 16. Additional work has been done on candidate genes, i.e., genes chosen a priori and not through a genome scanning studies, including several studies of CNTNAP2 and some recent work implicating BDNF as a gene x gene interaction partner of genetic variation on chromosome 13 that influences language. These recent developments may allow for better use of post-mortem human brain samples functional studies and animal models for circumscribed language subcomponents. In the future, the identification of genetic variation associated with language phenotypes will provide the molecular pathways to understanding human language.</AbstractText | [
[
"21893533",
"The multiple time scales of sleep dynamics as a challenge for modelling the sleeping brain.",
"A particular property of the sleeping brain is that it exhibits dynamics on very different time scales ranging from the typical sleep oscillations such as sleep spindles and slow waves that can ... | [
[
"23077800",
"Occupational exposure to styrene in the fibreglass reinforced plastic industry: comparison between two different manufacturing processes.",
"Styrene is used in manufacturing fiberglass reinforced plastics: and occupational exposure was related to neurotoxicology and genotoxicity. The sum ... |
37539014 | Quantification of Speech Disfluency as a Marker of Medication-Induced Cognitive Impairment: An Application of Computerized Speech Analysis in Neuropharmacology. | We present the results of a study investigating the use of speech and language characteristics extracted from spontaneous spoken discourse to assess changes in cognitive function. Specifically, we investigated the use of automatic speech recognition technology to characterize spontaneous speech disfluency induced by topiramate, an anti-epileptic medication with language-related side-effects. We audio recorded spontaneous speech samples from 20 participants during several picture description tasks and analyzed the recordings automatically and manually to extract a range of spoken fluency measurements including speech discontinuities (e.g., filled pauses, false starts, and repetitions), silent pause duration, speaking rate and vowel lengthening. Our results indicate that some of these paralinguistic speech characteristics are a) sensitive to the effects of topiramate, b) are associated with topiramate concentrations in the blood, and c) complement standard neuropsychological tests typically used to investigate cognitive effects of medications. This work demonstrates the use of computational linguistic tools to assess cognitive effects in a more sensitive, objective and reproducible manner than is currently available with standard tests.</AbstractText | [
[
"21748284",
"A failure to normalize biochemical and metabolic insults during morphine withdrawal disrupts synaptic repair in mice transgenic for HIV-gp120.",
"Drug abuse in HIV-infected individuals accelerates the onset and progression of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND). Opiates are a c... | [
[
"23023166",
"The vagal innervation of the gut and immune homeostasis.",
"The central nervous system interacts dynamically with the immune system to modulate inflammation through humoral and neural pathways. Recently, in animal models of sepsis, the vagus nerve (VN) has been proposed to play a crucial ... |
23219683 | The effect of lead exposure on brain iron homeostasis and the expression of DMT1/FP1 in the brain in developing and aged rats. | The relation between lead (Pb) and iron (Fe) becomes increasingly concerned because they are both divalent metals that are absorbed by the same intestinal mechanism, and Pb exposure and Fe deficiency in the developmental brain, as well as Fe overload in the aged brain, can cause cognitive deficits. However, the interaction between Pb exposure and Fe status in the brain has not been established. Therefore, in the current study, we examined the effects of maternal ingestion of Pb in drinking water during gestation and lactation on the Fe status and the expression of divalent metal transporter 1 (DMT1) and ferroportin 1 (FP1) in the brain of offspring. The offspring were followed through old age, with measurements taken at postnatal week 3 (PNW3), 41 (PNW41) and 70 (PNW70). Pb exposure increases the Fe content in the old-aged rats' brain, which might be not subjected to DMT1 mediating, but may be associated with the decrease expression of FP1. Furthermore, the effect of Pb on FP1 expression is regulated at transcriptional and posttranscriptional levels. The perturbation in Fe homeostasis may contribute to the neurotoxicology consequences induced by Pb exposure, and FP1 may play a role in Pb-induced Fe cumulation in the brain.</AbstractText | [
[
"9526084",
"Category-specific semantic deficits in focal and widespread brain damage: a computational account.",
"Category-specific semantic impairments have been explained in terms of preferential damage to different types of features (e.g., perceptual vs. functional). This account is compatible with... | [
[
"37539014",
"Quantification of Speech Disfluency as a Marker of Medication-Induced Cognitive Impairment: An Application of Computerized Speech Analysis in Neuropharmacology.",
"We present the results of a study investigating the use of speech and language characteristics extracted from spontaneous spo... |
23730352 | Sleep, neuroengineering and dynamics. | Modeling of consciousness-related phenomena and neuroengineering are fields that are rapidly growing together. We review recent approaches and developments and point out some promising directions of future research: Understanding the dynamics of consciousness states and associated oscillations, pathological oscillations as well as their treatment by stimulation, neuroprosthetics and brain-computer-interface approaches, and stimulation approaches that probe, influence and strengthen memory consolidation. In all these fields, computational models connect theory, neurophysiology and neuroengineering research and pave a way towards medical applications.</AbstractText | [
[
"20800054",
"Kisspeptins: bridging energy homeostasis and reproduction.",
"Body energy reserves and metabolic state are relevant modifiers of puberty onset and fertility; forms of metabolic stress ranging from persistent energy insufficiency to morbid obesity are frequently linked to reproductive diso... | [
[
"23166484",
"Functional connectivity and tuning curves in populations of simultaneously recorded neurons.",
"How interactions between neurons relate to tuned neural responses is a longstanding question in systems neuroscience. Here we use statistical modeling and simultaneous multi-electrode recording... |
23576843 | Possibilities offered by implantable miniaturized cuff-electrodes for insect neurophysiology. | Recent advances in microsystems technology led to a miniaturization of cuff-electrodes, which suggests these electrodes not just for long-term neuronal recordings in mammalians, but also in medium-sized insects. In this study we investigated the possibilities offered by cuff-electrodes for neuroethology using insects as a model organism. The implantation in the neck of a tropical bushcricket resulted in high quality extracellular nerve recordings of different units responding to various acoustic, vibratory, optical and mechanical stimuli. In addition, multi-unit nerve activity related to leg movements was recorded in insects walking on a trackball. A drawback of bi-polar nerve recordings obtained during tethered flight was overlay of nerve activity with large amplitude muscle potentials. Interestingly, cuff-electrode recordings were robust to withstand walking and flight activity so that good quality nerve recordings were possible even three days after electrode implantation. Recording multi-unit nerve activity in intact insects required an elaborate spike sorting algorithm in order to discriminate neuronal units responding to external stimuli from background activity. In future, a combination of miniaturized cuff-electrodes and light-weight amplifiers equipped with a wireless transmitter will allow the investigation of neuronal processes underlying natural behavior in freely moving insects. By this means cuff-electrodes may contribute to the development of realistic neuronal models simulating neuronal processes underlying natural insect behavior, such like mate choice and predator avoidance.</AbstractText | [
[
"11222789",
"Paraplegin gene analysis in hereditary spastic paraparesis (HSP) pedigrees in northeast England.",
"To identify the frequency and characterize the phenotype of paraplegin mutations in the hereditary spastic paraparesis (HSP) population in the northeast of England.</AbstractText HSP is a d... | [
[
"23252730",
"The physiology of fish behaviour: a selective review of developments over the past 40 years(§).",
"During the past 40 years many new techniques have emerged that have been pivotal in furthering understanding of the physiology of fish behaviour. Behavioural studies have been enhanced by vi... |
23341313 | Absence of verbal recall or memory for symptom acquisition in fear and trauma exposure: a conceptual case for fear conditioning and learned nonuse in assessment and treatment. | Absence of memory or verbal recall for symptom acquisition in fear and trauma exposure, as well as absence of successful coping behavior for life events, is associated with a number of diagnoses, including traumatic brain injury, posttraumatic stress disorder, pain, and anxiety. The difficulty with diagnosis and treatment planning based on the absence of recall, memory, and successful coping behavior is threefold: (1) these assessments do not distinguish between disruption of behavior and lack of capacity, (2) the absence of verbal recall and memory complicates cognitive-based treatment, and (3) a confounding issue is the same absent behavior can be observed at different times and contexts. While memory of the specific details of the initial traumatic event(s) may not be available to verbal report, the existence of time- and context-dependent relationships for the initial as well as subsequent experiences is arguable. The absence of memory or lack of verbal recall does not rule out measurable physiological bodily responses for the initial trauma(s), nor does it help to establish the effects of subsequent experiences for symptom expression. Also, the absence of memory must include the prospect of fear-based learning that does not require or involve the cortex. It is posited that the literatures of fear conditioning and learned nonuse provide complementary illustrations of how the time and context of the initial trauma(s) and subsequent experiences affect behavior, which is not dependent on the effected individual being able to provide a memory-based verbal report. The replicated clinical application demonstrates that, without scientific demonstration, neither neuroanatomy nor verbal report can be assumed sufficient to predict overt behavior or physiologic responses. For example, while commonly assumed to be predictively so, autonomic nervous system innervation is insufficient to define the unique stimulus- and context-dependent physiological responses of an individual. By recording simultaneous physiological responses to the controlled presentation of a context-dependent stimulus, the unique relationships of physiology and overt behaviors for the individual can be demonstrated. Using this process also allows more complex virtual reality or other in vivo stimulus assessments to be incorporated for the development of individually tailored assessments and therapeutic plans. Thus, with or without memory or verbal recall, the use of multiple time- and context-specific simultaneous physiological measures and overt behavior can guide clinical effort as well as serve to objectively assess the ongoing treatment and its outcome.</AbstractText | [
[
"21749991",
"Acetazolamide-responsive exercise-induced episodic ataxia associated with a novel homozygous DARS2 mutation.",
"Leukoencephalopathy with brain stem and spinal cord involvement and brain lactate elevation (LBSL) was recently shown to be caused by mutations in the DARS2 gene, encoding a mit... | [
[
"23176028",
"Iranians' contribution to world literature on neuroscience.",
"The purpose of this study is to analyse Iranian scientific publications in the neuroscience subfields by librarians and neuroscientists, using Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) via Web of Science data over the period, 200... |
20360360 | Introduction of green fluorescent protein (GFP) into hippocampal neurons through viral infection. | Expression of green fluorescent protein (GFP), its more fluorescent mutant forms (e.g., EGFP [enhanced GFP]), or their fusion protein derivatives, affords a number of informative possibilities in cellular neuroscience. EGFP is a soluble protein and appears to be homogeneously distributed within the cytosol of neurons when expressed. Thus, it reveals the structure of the neuron, including the cell body, and axonal and dendritic arbors. It is also sufficiently bright to reveal detailed structures such as axonal boutons and dendritic spines. When expressed as a fusion protein, EGFP can provide information about the distribution characteristics of the proteins within neurons. Furthermore, during single-cell electrophysiological studies, such expression can direct the investigator to record from a cell carrying a foreign gene. In this protocol, we describe the use of the Sindbis pseudovirus expression system to deliver GFP to neurons. Sindbis is a member of the alphaviruses, which are plus-stranded RNA viruses. This protocol uses the DH(26S) strain, which preferentially infects neurons over glia (50:1). Two infection methods are given: one for dissociated hippocampal cultured neurons and one for organotypic hippocampal slices.</AbstractText | [
[
"11377409",
"Double-blind naltrexone and placebo comparison study in the treatment of pathological gambling.",
"The authors' goal was to assess the efficacy and tolerability of naltrexone in the treatment of pathologic gambling disorder.</AbstractText Eighty-three subjects who met criteria for DSM-IV ... | [
[
"20976129",
"The picture of the linguistic brain: how sharp can it be? Reply to Fedorenko & Kanwisher.",
"What is the best way to learn how the brain analyzes linguistic input? Two popular methods have attempted to segregate and localize linguistic processes: analyses of language deficits subsequent t... |
20419352 | Blue moon neurovirology: the merits of studying rare CNS diseases of viral origin. | While measles virus (MV) continues to have a significant impact on human health, causing 150,000-200,000 deaths worldwide each year, the number of fatalities that can be attributed to MV-triggered central nervous system (CNS) diseases are on the order of a few hundred individuals annually (World Health Organization 2009). Despite this modest impact, substantial effort has been expended to understand the basis of measles-triggered neuropathogenesis. What can be gained by studying such a rare condition? Simply stated, the wealth of studies in this field have revealed core principles that are relevant to multiple neurotropic pathogens, and that inform the broader field of viral pathogenesis. In recent years, the emergence of powerful in vitro systems, novel animal models, and reverse genetics has enabled insights into the basis of MV persistence, the complexity of MV interactions with neurons and the immune system, and the role of immune and CNS development in virus-triggered disease. In this review, we highlight some key advances, link relevant measles-based studies to the broader disciplines of neurovirology and viral pathogenesis, and propose future areas of study for the field of measles-mediated neurological disease.</AbstractText | [
[
"942927",
"Morphine suppression of ethanol withdrawal in mice.",
"The acute administration of morphine, alcohol or dopamine results in a pronounced suppression of the convulsions produced by alcohol in mice. The suppressive action of morphine on alcohol withdrawal in the mouse apparently is not a prod... | [
[
"20826300",
"Neuroscience and education: an ideal partnership for producing evidence-based solutions to Guide 21(st) Century Learning.",
"Neuro-Education is a nascent discipline that seeks to blend the collective fields of neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and education to create a better u... |
20739175 | Micro-scale and microfluidic devices for neurobiology. | The precise spatial and temporal control afforded by microfluidic devices make them uniquely suited as experimental tools for cellular neuroscience. Micro-structures have been developed to direct the placement of cells and small organisms within a device. Microfluidics can precisely define pharmacological microenvironments, mimicking conditions found in vivo with the advantage of defined parameters which are usually difficult to control and manipulate in vivo. These devices are compatible with high-resolution microscopy, are simple to assemble, and are reproducible. In this review we will focus on microfluidic devices that have recently been developed for small, whole organisms such as C. elegans and dissociated cultured neurons. These devices have improved control over the placement of cells or organisms and allowed unprecedented experimental access, enabling novel investigations in neurobiology.</AbstractText | [
[
"20665248",
"Developmental changes in the expression of kisspeptin mRNA in rat hypothalamus.",
"Kisspeptin is a family of neuropeptides and the natural ligands of G protein-coupled receptor (GPR)-54. Kisspeptin/GPR-54 system is known to play a pivotal role in puberty onset and in the regulation of rep... | [
[
"20802854",
"Optical mapping of release properties in synapses.",
"Synapses are important functional units that determine how information flows through the brain. Understanding their biophysical properties and the molecules that underpin them is an important goal of cellular neuroscience. Thus, it is ... |
23666281 | [What can microscopy teach us on suicide?]. | The fine neuroanatomy of mood disorders and suicide is a relatively recent field of investigation. Together with neuroimaging, molecular biology and biochemistry, histological analyses of post-mortem brain regions implicated in mood regulation allow gaining a better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying major depression and suicide. In this article, the author discusses recent studies conducted in his laboratory on the fine neuroanatomy of the anterior cingular cortex (ACC). In particular, he presents data showing that ACC white matter fibrous astrocytes are hypertrophic in depressed suicides compared to matched sudden-death controls. These data are interpreted in the context of the neuroimmune hypothesis of major depression and suicide.</AbstractText | [
[
"21312401",
"Functional brain imaging in schizophrenia: selected results and methods.",
"Functional brain imaging studies of patients with schizophrenia may be grouped into those that assume that the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia are due to disordered circuitry within a critical brain region and... | [
[
"22905274",
"Toxocariasis and epilepsy: systematic review and meta-analysis.",
"Human toxocariasis is a zoonotic infection caused by the larval stages of Toxocara canis (T. canis) and less frequently Toxocara cati (T. cati). A relationship between toxocariasis and epilepsy has been hypothesized. We co... |
23110153 | Prediction of muscle activities from electrocorticograms in primary motor cortex of primates. | Electrocorticography (ECoG) has drawn attention as an effective recording approach for brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Previous studies have succeeded in classifying movement intention and predicting hand trajectories from ECoG. Despite such successes, however, there still remains considerable work for the realization of ECoG-based BMIs as neuroprosthetics. We developed a method to predict multiple muscle activities from ECoG measurements. We also verified that ECoG signals are effective for predicting muscle activities in time varying series when performing sequential movements. ECoG signals were band-pass filtered into separate sensorimotor rhythm bands, z-score normalized, and smoothed with a Gaussian filter. We used sparse linear regression to find the best fit between frequency bands of ECoG and electromyographic activity. The best average correlation coefficient and the normalized root-mean-square error were 0.92±0.06 and 0.06±0.10, respectively, in the flexor digitorum profundus finger muscle. The δ (1.5∼4Hz) and γ2 (50∼90Hz) bands contributed significantly more strongly than other frequency bands (P<0.001). These results demonstrate the feasibility of predicting muscle activity from ECoG signals in an online fashion.</AbstractText | [
[
"12716950",
"Hierarchical processing in spoken language comprehension.",
"Understanding spoken language requires a complex series of processing stages to translate speech sounds into meaning. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the brain regions that are involved in ... | [
[
"23237463",
"Interactions between tactile and proprioceptive representations in haptics.",
"Neuroprosthetic limbs, regardless of their sophisticated motor control, require sensory feedback to viably interact with the environment. Toward that aim, the authors examined interrelationships between tactile... |
23853342 | HermesD: A High-Rate Long-Range Wireless Transmission System for Simultaneous Multichannel Neural Recording Applications. | HermesD is a high-rate, low-power wireless transmission system to aid research in neural prosthetic systems for motor disabilities and basic motor neuroscience. It is the third generation of our "Hermes systems" aimed at recording and transmitting neural activity from brain-implanted electrode arrays. This system supports the simultaneous transmission of 32 channels of broadband data sampled at 30 ks/s, 12 b/sample, using frequency-shift keying modulation on a carrier frequency adjustable from 3.7 to 4.1 GHz, with a link range extending over 20 m. The channel rate is 24 Mb/s and the bit stream includes synchronization and error detection mechanisms. The power consumption, approximately 142 mW, is low enough to allow the system to operate continuously for 33 h, using two 3.6-V/1200-mAh Li-SOCl2 batteries. The transmitter was designed using off-the-shelf components and is assembled in a stack of three 28 mm ? 28-mm boards that fit in a 38 mm ? 38 mm ? 51-mm aluminum enclosure, a significant size reduction over the initial version of HermesD. A 7-dBi circularly polarized patch antenna is used as the transmitter antenna, while on the receiver side, a 13-dBi circular horn antenna is employed. The advantages of using circularly polarized waves are analyzed and confirmed by indoor measurements. The receiver is a stand-alone device composed of several submodules and is interfaced to a computer for data acquisition and processing. It is based on the superheterodyne architecture and includes automatic frequency control that keeps it optimally tuned to the transmitter frequency. The HermesD communications performance is shown through bit-error rate measurements and eye-diagram plots. The sensitivity of the receiver is -83 dBm for a bit-error probability of 10(-9). Experimental recordings from a rhesus monkey conducting multiple tasks show a signal quality comparable to commercial acquisition systems, both in the low-frequency (local field potentials) and upper-frequency bands (action potentials) of the neural signals. This system can be easily scaled up in terms of the number of channels and data rate to accommodate future generations of Hermes systems.</AbstractText | [
[
"23493966",
"Exploring sensory neuroscience through experience and experiment.",
"Many phenomena that we take for granted are illusions - color and motion on a TV or computer monitor, for example, or the impression of space in a stereo music recording. Even the stable image that we perceive when looki... | [
[
"20377146",
"Saccadic peak velocity sensitivity to variations in mental workload.",
"For research and applications in the field of (neuro)ergonomics, it is of increasing importance to have reliable methods for measuring mental workload. In the present study we examined the hypothesis that saccadic eye... |
23494679 | Electroretinograms in Drosophila: a robust and genetically accessible electrophysiological system for the undergraduate laboratory. | Laboratory courses in neurophysiology fulfill a critical need for inquiry-based training in undergraduate programs in neuroscience and biology. These courses typically use classical electrophysiological preparations to explore the basic features of neuronal function. However, current neuroscience research also focuses on elucidating the molecular and genetic mechanisms of neuronal function, using model systems that include mutant and transgenic animals. To bridge laboratory training in neurophysiology with modern molecular genetics, we describe a teaching model based on electroretinography of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a long-established model system for basic neuroscience research. Drosophila are easily maintained, economical, and have hundreds of neurophysiologically relevant mutant strains and genetic tools readily available. The Drosophila electroretinogram (ERG) is a simple and accessible extracellular recording of a neural signal in the fly eye in response to flashes of light. The signal is multifaceted and the response is sensitive to stimulation parameters such as intensity, duration and wavelength, thus forming a rich source of analysis for students. Most importantly, different mutations affecting key components of intracellular signaling, synaptic transmission or neuronal function can affect the ERG waveform in characteristic ways. Recording wild type and mutant ERGs allows students to examine firsthand the connection between genetics, biochemical pathways, and electrophysiology. This neurophysiology laboratory course can facilitate and enhance an understanding of the cellular and molecular contributions to neurophysiological recordings.</AbstractText | [
[
"19669582",
"Monitoring health implications of pesticide exposure in factory workers in Pakistan.",
"The study aimed to determine the hazardous health effects of pesticides exposure in the factory workers by measuring plasma cholinesterase (PChE), pesticides residues, and renal and hepatic biochemical... | [
[
"23671950",
"Effect of head circumference on parameters of pattern reversal visual evoked potential in healthy adults of central India.",
"Visual evoked response testing has been one of the most exciting clinical tools to be developed from neurophysiologic research in recent years and has provided us ... |
25419230 | Improving Executive Function and its Neurobiological Mechanisms through a Mindfulness-Based Intervention: Advances within the Field of Developmental Neuroscience. | Poor executive function (EF) has been associated with a host of short- and long-term problems across the lifespan, including elevated rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, drug abuse, and antisocial behavior. Mindfulness-based interventions that focus on increasing awareness of one's thoughts, emotions, and actions have been shown to improve specific aspects of EF, including attention, cognitive control, and emotion regulation. In this article, we apply a developmental neuroscience perspective to review research relevant to one specific mindfulness-based intervention, Integrative Body-Mind Training (IBMT). Randomized controlled trials of IBMT indicate improvements in specific EF components, and uniquely highlight the role of neural circuitry specific to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) as two brain-based mechanisms that underlie IBMT-related improvements. The relevance of improving specific dimensions of EF through short-term IBMT to prevent a cascade of risk behaviors for children and adolescents is described and future research directions are proposed.</AbstractText | [
[
"23017085",
"The maps problem and the mapping problem: two challenges for a cognitive neuroscience of speech and language.",
"Research on the brain basis of speech and language faces theoretical and empirical challenges. Most current research, dominated by imaging, deficit-lesion, and electrophysiolog... | [
[
"23505339",
"Baby Steps to Superintelligence: Neuroprosthetics and Children.",
"Children surviving neural injuries face challenges not seen by their adult counterparts, namely that they experience neural injury before reaching neurodevelopmental maturity. Neural prostheses offer one possible path to r... |
23137683 | Behavioral neuroscience: learning to suckle with signature odor. | A new study in mice reveals that an apparently innate behavior, suckling, is triggered not by a classical pheromone but by the pup learning the complex signature odor of its mother.</AbstractText | [
[
"17947337",
"Word-finding difficulty: a clinical analysis of the progressive aphasias.",
"The patient with word-finding difficulty presents a common and challenging clinical problem. The complaint of 'word-finding difficulty' covers a wide range of clinical phenomena and may signify any of a number of... | [
[
"22284580",
"Christfried Jakob's late views (1930-1949) on the psychogenetic function of the cerebral cortex and its localization: culmination of the neurophilosophical thought of a keen brain observer.",
"This article follows the culmination of the scientific thought of the neurobiologist Christfried... |
23010511 | Transcriptome analysis of Drosophila CNS midline cells reveals diverse peptidergic properties and a role for castor in neuronal differentiation. | One of the key aspects of neuronal differentiation is the array of neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter receptors that each neuron possesses. One important goal of developmental neuroscience is to understand how these differentiated properties are established during development. In this paper, we use fluorescence activated cell sorting and RNA-seq to determine the transcriptome of the Drosophila CNS midline cells, which consist of a small number of well-characterized neurons and glia. These data revealed that midline cells express 9 neuropeptide precursor genes, 13 neuropeptide receptor genes, and 31 small-molecule neurotransmitter receptor genes. In situ hybridization and high-resolution confocal analyses were carried-out to determine the midline cell identity for these neuropeptides and the neuropeptide receptors. The results revealed a surprising level of diversity. Neuropeptide genes are expressed in a variety of midline cell types, including motoneurons, GABAergic interneurons, and midline glia. These data revealed previously unknown functional differences among the highly-related iVUM neurons. There also exist segmental differences in expression for the same neuronal sub-type. Similar experiments on midline-expressed neuropeptide receptor genes reveal considerable diversity in synaptic inputs. Multiple receptor types were expressed in midline interneurons and motoneurons, and, in one case, link feeding behavior to gut peristalsis and locomotion. There were also segmental differences, variations between the 3 iVUMs, and three hormone receptor genes were broadly expressed in most midline cells. The Drosophila Castor transcription factor is present at high levels in iVUM5, which is both GABAergic and expresses the short neuropeptide F precursor gene. Genetic and misexpression experiments indicated that castor specifically controls expression of the short neuropeptide F precursor gene, but does not affect iVUM cell fate or expression of Gad1. This indicates a novel function for castor in regulating neuropeptide gene expression.</AbstractText | [
[
"18457512",
"Timing, storage, and comparison of stimulus duration engage discrete anatomical components of a perceptual timing network.",
"The temporal discrimination paradigm requires subjects to compare the duration of a probe stimulus to that of a sample previously stored in working or long-term me... | [
[
"23355814",
"What is social about social perception research?",
"A growing consensus in social cognitive neuroscience holds that large portions of the primate visual brain are dedicated to the processing of social information, i.e., to those aspects of stimuli that are usually encountered in social in... |
22807662 | Coding conspecific identity and motion in the electric sense. | Interactions among animals can result in complex sensory signals containing a variety of socially relevant information, including the number, identity, and relative motion of conspecifics. How the spatiotemporal properties of such evolving naturalistic signals are encoded is a key question in sensory neuroscience. Here, we present results from experiments and modeling that address this issue in the context of the electric sense, which combines the spatial aspects of vision and touch, with the temporal aspects of audition. Wave-type electric fish, such as the brown ghost knifefish, Apteronotus leptorhynchus, used in this study, are uniquely identified by the frequency of their electric organ discharge (EOD). Multiple beat frequencies arise from the superposition of the EODs of each fish. We record the natural electrical signals near the skin of a "receiving" fish that are produced by stationary and freely swimming conspecifics. Using spectral analysis, we find that the primary beats, and the secondary beats between them ("beats of beats"), can be greatly influenced by fish swimming; the resulting motion produces low-frequency envelopes that broaden all the beat peaks and reshape the "noise floor". We assess the consequences of this motion on sensory coding using a model electroreceptor. We show that the primary and secondary beats are encoded in the afferent spike train, but that motion acts to degrade this encoding. We also simulate the response of a realistic population of receptors, and find that it can encode the motion envelope well, primarily due to the receptors with lower firing rates. We discuss the implications of our results for the identification of conspecifics through specific beat frequencies and its possible hindrance by active swimming.</AbstractText | [
[
"21731699",
"Recognition of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine by the Uhrf1 SRA domain.",
"Recent discovery of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) in genomic DNA raises the question how this sixth base is recognized by cellular proteins. In contrast to the methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) of MeCP2, we found that the S... | [
[
"22922354",
"Selective interactions of spinophilin with the C-terminal domains of the δ- and μ-opioid receptors and G proteins differentially modulate opioid receptor signaling.",
"Previous studies have shown that the intracellular domains of opioid receptors serve as platforms for the formation of a ... |
23161463 | Recent advances in clinical neurogenetics. | Herein, I review the main papers in neurogenetic research published in the Journal of Neurology over the last year.</AbstractText | [
[
"15050709",
"Tactile discrimination activates the visual cortex of the recently blind naive to Braille: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in humans.",
"The occipital cortex of blind subjects is known to be activated during tactile discrimination tasks such as Braille reading. To investigat... | [
[
"23280856",
"Intrahippocampal infusion of the Ih blocker ZD7288 slows evoked theta rhythm and produces anxiolytic-like effects in the elevated plus maze.",
"Hippocampal theta rhythm has been associated with a number of behavioral processes, including learning and memory, spatial behavior, sensorimotor... |
22940423 | HIV immune complexes prevent excitotoxicity by interaction with NMDA receptors. | Human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV)-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND) is a neurodegenerative disease for which there is no available neuroprotective therapy. Viral proteins, such as Tat, have been implicated as agents of neurotoxicity via multiple mechanisms, including effects by directly binding to the NMDA receptor. We evaluated the ability of the immune response against Tat to modulate neurotoxicity at glutamate receptors.</AbstractText Neurotoxicity was measured in primary neuronal-glial cultures and in hippocampal slice cultures. We used immunoprecipitation experiments to demonstrate interaction between Tat, NMDA receptor, and anti-Tat antibody. Using known structures of Tat and NMDA receptors, we developed a model of their interactions.</AbstractText Antibodies to Tat attenuated Tat-mediated neurotoxicity. Interestingly, Tat immune complexes also blocked neurotoxicity caused by NMDA receptor agonists but not kainate/AMPA receptor agonists. Neither Tat nor antibody alone blocked the excitotoxic effect, nor did an unrelated antigen-antibody complex. The protective effect of the Tat immune complexes was also lost when Tat was modified by nitrosylation or by using a deletion mutant of Tat.</AbstractText The ability of viral immune complexes to interact with NMDA receptors and prevent excitotoxicity represents a novel host defense mechanism. Host immune responses may influence host susceptibility to various effects of viral proteins, modulating HIV complications, such as onset of HAND. These observations provide rationale for development of vaccine therapies targeting Tat for prevention of HAND.</AbstractText | [
[
"17959477",
"Increasing the performance of cortically-controlled prostheses.",
"Neural prostheses have received considerable attention due to their potential to dramatically improve the quality of life of severely disabled patients. Cortically-controlled prostheses are able to translate neural activit... | [
[
"23273129",
"Phase synchronization of neuronal noise in mouse hippocampal epileptiform dynamics.",
"Organized brain activity is the result of dynamical, segregated neuronal signals that may be used to investigate synchronization effects using sophisticated neuroengineering techniques. Phase synchrony ... |
23183130 | Nanopsychiatry--the potential role of nanotechnologies in the future of psychiatry: a systematic review. | Nanomedicine is defined as the area using nanotechnology's concepts for the benefit of human beings' health and well being. In this article, we aimed to provide an overview of areas where nanotechnology is applied and how they could be extended to care for psychiatric illnesses. The main applications of nanotechnology in psychiatry are (i) pharmacology. There are two main difficulties in neuropharmacology: drugs have to pass the blood-brain barrier and then to be internalized by targeted cells. Nanoparticles could increase drugs bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, especially improving safety and efficacy of psychotropic drugs. Liposomes, nanosomes, nanoparticle polymers, nanobubbles are some examples of this targeted drug delivery. Nanotechnologies could also add new pharmacological properties, like nanoshells and dendrimers (ii) living analysis. Nanotechnology provides technical assistance to in vivo imaging or metabolome analysis (iii) central nervous system modeling. Research teams have succeeded to modelize inorganic synapses and mimick synaptic behavior, a step essential for further creation of artificial neural systems. Some nanoparticle assemblies present the same small worlds and free-scale networks architecture as cortical neural networks. Nanotechnologies and quantum physics could be used to create models of artificial intelligence and mental illnesses. We are not about to see a concrete application of nanomedicine in daily psychiatric practice. Even if nanotechnologies are promising, their safety is still inconsistent and this must be kept in mind. However, it seems essential that psychiatrists do not forsake this area of research the perspectives of which could be decisive in the field of mental illness.</AbstractText | [
[
"17506923",
"Neuropsychological and behavioural disinhibition in adult ADHD compared to borderline personality disorder.",
"Although attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is thought to be an inhibitory disorder, the question remains of how specific the inhibitory deficit is in adults and whe... | [
[
"23161463",
"Recent advances in clinical neurogenetics.",
"Herein, I review the main papers in neurogenetic research published in the Journal of Neurology over the last year.</AbstractText"
]
] |
23303059 | Using standardized fMRI protocols to identify patterns of prefrontal circuit dysregulation that are common and specific to cognitive and emotional tasks in major depressive disorder: first wave results from the iSPOT-D study. | Functional neuroimaging studies have implicated dysregulation of prefrontal circuits in major depressive disorder (MDD), and these circuits are a viable target for predicting treatment outcomes. However, because of the heterogeneity of tasks and samples used in studies to date, it is unclear whether the central dysfunction is one of prefrontal hyperreactivity or hyporeactivity. We used a standardized battery of tasks and protocols for functional magnetic resonance imaging, to identify the common vs the specific prefrontal circuits engaged by these tasks in the same 30 outpatients with MDD compared with 30 matched, healthy control participants, recruited as part of the International Study to Predict Optimized Treatment in Depression (iSPOT-D). Reflecting cognitive neuroscience theory and established evidence, the battery included cognitive tasks designed to assess functions of selective attention, sustained attention-working memory and response inhibition, and emotion tasks to assess explicit conscious and implicit nonconscious viewing of facial emotion. MDD participants were distinguished by a distinctive biosignature of: hypoactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during working memory updating and during conscious negative emotion processing; hyperactivation of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex during working memory and response inhibition cognitive tasks and hypoactivation of the dorsomedial prefrontal during conscious processing of positive emotion. These results show that the use of standardized tasks in the same participants provides a way to tease out prefrontal circuitry dysfunction related to cognitive and emotional functions, and not to methodological or sample variations. These findings provide the frame of reference for identifying prefrontal biomarker predictors of treatment outcomes in MDD.</AbstractText | [
[
"20012068",
"Astrocytes: biology and pathology.",
"Astrocytes are specialized glial cells that outnumber neurons by over fivefold. They contiguously tile the entire central nervous system (CNS) and exert many essential complex functions in the healthy CNS. Astrocytes respond to all forms of CNS insult... | [
[
"23955619",
"An autopsy case of the Marburg variant of multiple sclerosis (acute multiple sclerosis).",
"We herein report an autopsy case of the Marburg variant of multiple sclerosis (MS). A 29-year-old woman developed acute and progressive neurological symptoms. A diagnosis of MS was suspected based ... |
22922354 | Selective interactions of spinophilin with the C-terminal domains of the δ- and μ-opioid receptors and G proteins differentially modulate opioid receptor signaling. | Previous studies have shown that the intracellular domains of opioid receptors serve as platforms for the formation of a multi-component signaling complex consisting of various interacting partners (Leontiadis et al., 2009, Cell Signal. 21, 1218-1228; Georganta et al., 2010, Neuropharmacology, 59(3), 139-148). In the present study we demonstrate that spinophilin a dendritic-spine enriched scaffold protein associates with δ- and μ-opioid receptors (δ-ΟR, μ-OR) constitutively in HEK293 an interaction that is altered upon agonist administration and enhanced upon forskolin treatment for both μ-OR and δ-ΟR. Spinophilin association with the opioid receptors is mediated via the third intracellular loop and a conserved region of the C-terminal tails. The portion of spinophilin responsible for interaction with the δ-OR and μ-OR is narrowed to a region encompassing amino acids 151-444. Spinophilin, RGS4, Gα and Gβγ subunits of G proteins form a multi-protein complex using specific regions of spinophilin and a conserved amino acid stretch of the C-terminal tails of both δ-μ-ORs. Expression of spinophilin in HEK293 cells potentiated DPDPE-mediated adenylyl-cyclase inhibition of δ-OR leaving unaffected the levels of cAMP accumulation mediated by the μ-OR. Moreover, measurements of extracellular signal regulated kinase (ERK1,2) phosphorylation indicated that the presence of spinophilin attenuated agonist-driven ERK1,2 phosphorylation mediated upon activation of the δ-OR but not the μ-OR. Collectively, these findings suggest that spinophilin associates with both δ- and μ-ΟR and G protein subunits in HEK293 cells participating in a multimeric signaling complex that displays a differential regulatory role in opioid receptor signaling.</AbstractText | [
[
"21312401",
"Functional brain imaging in schizophrenia: selected results and methods.",
"Functional brain imaging studies of patients with schizophrenia may be grouped into those that assume that the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia are due to disordered circuitry within a critical brain region and... | [
[
"23055474",
"The Hodgkin-Huxley heritage: from channels to circuits.",
"The Hodgkin-Huxley studies of the action potential, published 60 years ago, are a central pillar of modern neuroscience research, ranging from molecular investigations of the structural basis of ion channel function to the computa... |
23504446 | Using equivalence-based instruction to increase efficiency in teaching neuroanatomy. | A goal of all instruction is to efficiently allocate time spent teaching -- balancing redundancy that enhances learning with redundancy that is irrelevant to increasing student understanding. Efficient allocation of time allows the instructor to present additional material and go into more detail about the information being presented. Here we borrow laboratory research on concept formation and apply these formal principles in teaching introductory neuroanatomy within a lecture course on Behavioral Neuroscience. Concept formation is taught by pairing multiple stimuli, for instance brain name, location, and function, in such a way that novel associations within a category emerge without direct training. This study demonstrates that careful selection of associations by the instructor can encourage the spontaneous emergence of novel associations within a concept or category, thereby increasing efficiency of teaching and by extension, the depth of material that can be taught.</AbstractText | [
[
"9626715",
"The role of defeat and entrapment (arrested flight) in depression: an exploration of an evolutionary view.",
"The social rank theory of psychopathology suggests that with the evolution of social hierarchies various psychobiological mechanisms became attuned to the success or failure in con... | [
[
"23248404",
"Neuroprotective activity of Stereospermum suaveolens DC against 6-OHDA induced Parkinson's disease model.",
"To evaluate the neuroprotective effect of Stereospermum suaveolens DC on 6-hydroxy dopamine induced Parkinson's disease model.</AbstractText The study was conducted on Sprague-Dawl... |
23371266 | [Funcion sparing surgery in uro-oncology: germ cell tumors of the testis]. | Surgery in germ cell tumors of the testis (TGT) may result in andrological disorders, both after orchiectomy and after retroperitoneal lymphadenectomy (RPLND). Bilateral orchiectomy suppresses both testicular functions: exocrine and endocrine. In selected cases with bilateral TGT (metachronous/synchronous), or in the case of TGT in monorchid patients, partial orchiectomy (enucleation of the tumor) can preserve both functions with a low risk of relapse in residual testicular parenchyma, in the absence of intraepithelial neoplasia (TIN). In cases of TIN and normal testosterone levels (80%), the fertility is maintained in 50% of patients. In these cases the use of radiotherapy on the residual testicular parenchyma can prevent the future development of invasive cancer, though compromising the hormonal function. The RPLND (open or laparoscopic) can produce major side effects, such as retrograde ejaculation. Knowledge of the adrenergic fiber retroperitoneal neuroanatomy enables to implement a "nerve sparing" surgery with an almost total reduction of this serious side effect, but that option is only available in few centers of excellence. Semen cryopreservation has become a common practice performed before any treatment that might impact on the andrological function of patients.</AbstractText | [
[
"8490989",
"Epidemiology of epilepsy in developing countries.",
"Epilepsy is an important health problem in developing countries, where its prevalence can be up to 57 per 1000 population. This article reviews the epidemiology of epilepsy in developing countries in terms of its incidence, prevalence, s... | [
[
"23476081",
"Framing Nicotine Addiction as a \"Disease of the Brain\": Social and Ethical Consequences.",
"In this article, we seek to better understand how a genomic vision of addiction may influence drug prevention and treatment. Though <i We explore the emerging view of addiction as a \"disease of ... |
23167712 | Affect-specific modulation of the N1m to shock-conditioned tones: magnetoencephalographic correlates. | Despite its fundamental relevance for representing the emotional world surrounding us, human affective neuroscience research has widely neglected the auditory system, at least in comparison to the visual domain. Here, we have investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of human affective auditory processing using time-sensitive whole-head magnetoencephalography. A novel and highly challenging affective associative learning procedure, 'MultiCS conditioning', involving multiple conditioned stimuli (CS) per affective category, was adopted to test whether previous findings from intramodal conditioning of multiple click-tones with an equal number of auditory emotional scenes (Bröckelmann et al., 2011 J. Neurosci., 31, 7801) would generalise to crossmodal conditioning of multiple click-tones with an electric shock as single aversive somatosensory unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Event-related magnetic fields were recorded in response to 40 click-tones before and after four contingent pairings of 20 CS with a shock and the other half remaining unpaired. In line with previous findings from intramodal MultiCS conditioning we found an affect-specific modulation of the auditory N1m component 100-150 ms post-stimulus within a distributed frontal-temporal-parietal neural network. Increased activation for shock-associated tones was lateralised to right-hemispheric regions, whereas unpaired safety-signalling tones were preferentially processed in the left hemisphere. Participants did not show explicit awareness of the contingent CS-UCS relationship, yet behavioural conditioning effects were indicated on an indirect measure of stimulus valence. Our findings imply converging evidence for a rapid and highly differentiating affect-specific modulation of the auditory N1m after intramodal as well crossmodal MultiCS conditioning and a correspondence of the modulating impact of emotional attention on early affective processing in vision and audition.</AbstractText | [
[
"17030182",
"The vagus nerve: a tonic inhibitory influence associated with inflammatory bowel disease in a murine model.",
"The recently proposed Inflammatory Reflex describes an interaction between the vagus nerve and peripheral macrophages, resulting in attenuation of proinflammatory cytokine releas... | [
[
"23245219",
"Ventral striatum activation to prosocial rewards predicts longitudinal declines in adolescent risk taking.",
"Adolescence is a period of intensified emotions and an increase in motivated behaviors and passions. Evidence from developmental neuroscience suggests that this heightened emotion... |
23095170 | High yield derivation of enriched glutamatergic neurons from suspension-cultured mouse ESCs for neurotoxicology research. | Recently, there has been a strong emphasis on identifying an in vitro model for neurotoxicity research that combines the biological relevance of primary neurons with the scalability, reproducibility and genetic tractability of continuous cell lines. Derived neurons should be homotypic, exhibit neuron-specific gene expression and morphology, form functioning synapses and consistently respond to neurotoxins in a fashion indistinguishable from primary neurons. However, efficient methods to produce neuronal populations that are suitable alternatives to primary neurons have not been available.</AbstractText With the objective of developing a more facile, robust and efficient method to generate enriched glutamatergic neuronal cultures, we evaluated the neurogenic capacity of three mouse embryonic stem cell (ESC) lines (R1, C57BL/6 and D3) adapted to feeder-independent suspension culture. Neurogenesis and neuronal maturation were characterized as a function of time in culture using immunological, genomic, morphological and functional metrics. The functional responses of ESNs to neurotropic toxins with distinctly different targets and mechanisms of toxicity, such as glutamate, α-latrotoxin (LTX), and botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT), were also evaluated.</AbstractText Suspension-adapted ESCs expressed markers of pluripotency through at least 30 passages, and differentiation produced 97×106 neural progenitor cells (NPCs) per 10-cm dish. Greater than 99% of embryonic stem cell-derived neurons (ESNs) expressed neuron-specific markers by 96 h after plating and rapidly developed complex axodendritic arbors and appropriate compartmentalization of neurotypic proteins. Expression profiling demonstrated the presence of transcripts necessary for neuronal function and confirmed that ESN populations were predominantly glutamatergic. Furthermore, ESNs were functionally receptive to all toxins with sensitivities and responses consistent with primary neurons.</AbstractText These findings demonstrate a cost-effective, scalable and flexible method to produce a highly enriched glutamatergic neuron population. The functional characterization of pathophysiological responses to neurotropic toxins and the compatibility with multi-well plating formats were used to demonstrate the suitability of ESNs as a discovery platform for molecular mechanisms of action, moderate-throughput analytical approaches and diagnostic screening. Furthermore, for the first time we demonstrate a cell-based model that is sensitive to all seven BoNT serotypes with EC50 values comparable to those reported in primary neuron populations. These data providing compelling evidence that ESNs offer a neuromimetic platform suitable for the evaluation of molecular mechanisms of neurotoxicity.</AbstractText | [
[
"20012068",
"Astrocytes: biology and pathology.",
"Astrocytes are specialized glial cells that outnumber neurons by over fivefold. They contiguously tile the entire central nervous system (CNS) and exert many essential complex functions in the healthy CNS. Astrocytes respond to all forms of CNS insult... | [
[
"22520647",
"European study of research and development in mobility technology for persons with disabilities.",
"\\In the fall of 2010, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Veteran's Administration jointly supported a review of mobility technology in Europe. ... |
29913996 | The attenuation of pain behaviour and serum interleukin-6 concentration by nimesulide in a rat model of neuropathic pain. | Background Evidence for a role of immune system in hyperalgesic pain states is increasing. Recent work in neuroimmunology suggests that the immune system does more than simply perform its well known functions of recognizing and removing invading pathogens and tumors. Interest in neuroinflammation and neuroimmune activation has grown rapidly in recent years with the recognition of the role of central nervous system inflammatiom and immune responses in the aetiology of pain states. Among various theories, the role of inflammatory responses of the injured nerve has recently received attention. Cytokines are heterogenous group of polypeptides that activate the immune system and mediate inflammatory responses, acting on a variety of tissue, including the peripheral and central nervous system. Interleukin-6 (IL-6) a pro-inflammatory cytokine, is potentially important in pain aetiology, have pronociceptive actions. Neuropathic pain may be due to a primary insult to the peripheral or central nervous system. Substances released during inflammation from immune cells play an important role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. Nimesulide, a highly selective cox-2 inhibitor, effectively reduces hyperalgesia due to peripherally administration of inflammatory agents like formalin. The safety of nimesulide was reported for some conditions in which other NSAIDs are contraindicated. Here we have determined the effect of nimesulide on pain behaviour and serum IL-6 level in chronic constriction injury (CCI) model of neuropathic pain. Methods Experiments were carried out on male Wistar rats, (weight 150-200 g, n = 8). Rats were divided into 3 different groups: 1-CCI + saline 0.9% 2Sham + saline 0.9% (control) 3CCI + drug. Nimesulide (1.25, 2.5, 5 mg/kg, i.p.) was injected 1h before surgery and continued daily to day 14 post-ligation. 42 °C water for thermal hyperalgesia, von Frey filaments for mechanical allodynia, acetone test for cool allodynia and 10 °C water for cold hyperalgesia were respectively used as pain behavioural tests. Behavioural tests were recorded before surgery and on postoperative days 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 14 and the serum concentration of IL-6 was determined at the day 14. Results The results of this study showed a decrease in hyperalgesia and allodynia following nimesulide administration. Conclusions It appears that nimesulide was able to reduce pain behaviour due to nerve inflammation and a parallel decrease in the serum IL-6 concentration was observed. Implications The immune system is an important mediator in the cascade of events that ultimately results in hyperalgesia. Cytokines contribute to the patheogenesis of neuropathic pain, therefore drugs that inhibit cytokine release from immune cells may reduce inflammatory pain states.</AbstractText | [
[
"21391760",
"The default network distinguishes construals of proximal versus distal events.",
"Humans enjoy a singular capacity to imagine events that differ from the \"here-and-now.\" Recent cognitive neuroscience research has linked such simulation processes to the brain's \"default network.\" Howev... | [
[
"20817916",
"Neuroscience: viable applications in education?",
"As a relatively young science, neuroscience is still finding its feet in potential collaborations with other disciplines. One such discipline is education, with the field of neuroeducation being on the horizon since the 1960s. However, al... |
22905274 | Toxocariasis and epilepsy: systematic review and meta-analysis. | Human toxocariasis is a zoonotic infection caused by the larval stages of Toxocara canis (T. canis) and less frequently Toxocara cati (T. cati). A relationship between toxocariasis and epilepsy has been hypothesized. We conducted a systematic review and a meta-analysis of available data to evaluate the strength of association between epilepsy and Toxocara spp. seropositivity and to propose some guidelines for future surveys.</AbstractText Electronic databases, the database from the Institute of Neuroepidemiology and Tropical Neurology of the University of Limoges (http://www-ient.unilim.fr/) and the reference lists of all relevant papers and books were screened up to October 2011.</AbstractText We performed a systematic review of literature on toxocariasis (the exposure) and epilepsy (the outcome). Two authors independently assessed eligibility and study quality and extracted data. A common odds ratio (OR) was estimated using a random-effects meta-analysis model of aggregated published data.</AbstractText Seven case-control studies met the inclusion criteria, for a total of 1867 participants (850 cases and 1017 controls). The percentage of seropositivity (presence of anti-Toxocara spp. antibodies) was higher among people with epilepsy (PWE) in all the included studies even if the association between epilepsy and Toxocara spp. seropositivity was statistically significant in only 4 studies, with crude ORs ranging 2.04-2.85. Another study bordered statistical significance, while in 2 of the included studies no significant association was found. A significant (p < 0.001) common OR of 1.92 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.50-2.44] was estimated. Similar results were found when meta-analysis was restricted to the studies considering an exclusively juvenile population and to surveys using Western Blot as confirmatory or diagnostic serological assay.</AbstractText Our results support the existence of a positive association between Toxocara spp. seropositivity and epilepsy. Further studies, possibly including incident cases, should be performed to better investigate the relationship between toxocariasis and epilepsy.</AbstractText | [
[
"17322880",
"Mapping autism risk loci using genetic linkage and chromosomal rearrangements.",
"Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are common, heritable neurodevelopmental conditions. The genetic architecture of ASDs is complex, requiring large samples to overcome heterogeneity. Here we broaden coverage ... | [
[
"23077800",
"Occupational exposure to styrene in the fibreglass reinforced plastic industry: comparison between two different manufacturing processes.",
"Styrene is used in manufacturing fiberglass reinforced plastics: and occupational exposure was related to neurotoxicology and genotoxicity. The sum ... |
22937517 | Optogenetics: a novel optical manipulation tool for medical investigation. | Optogenetics is a new and rapidly evolving gene and neuroengineering technology that allows optical control of specific populations of neurons without affecting other neurons in the brain at high temporal and spatial resolution. By heterologous expression of the light-sensitive membrane proteins, cell type-specific depolarization or hyperpolarization can be optically induced on a millisecond time scale. Optogenetics has the higher selectivity and specificity compared to traditional electrophysiological techniques and pharmaceutical methods. It has been a novel promising tool for medical research. Because of easy handling, high temporal and spatial precision, optogenetics has been applied to many aspects of nervous system research, such as tactual neural circuit, visual neural circuit, auditory neural circuit and olfactory neural circuit, as well as research of some neurological diseases. The review highlights the recent advances of optogenetics in medical study.</AbstractText | [
[
"18448316",
"A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content.",
"Many studies have demonstrated that the sensory and motor systems are activated during conceptual processing. Such results have been interpreted as indicating that concepts, and im... | [
[
"21723668",
"Steroid sulfatase-deficient mice exhibit endophenotypes relevant to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.",
"Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition characterised by inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity; it is frequently co-morbid... |
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