Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) is a cluster of risk factors that increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and late-life cognitive impairment and dementia. The risk factors include hypertension, elevated resting blood sugar/insulin resistance, h...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is typically diagnosed late in its progression. There is a need for biomarkers suitable for monitoring the disease progression at earlier stages to guide the development of novel neuroprotective therapies. One potential biomarker, α-synuclein, has been found in both the familial cases of PD, as well as the sporadic cases and is considered a key feature of PD. α-synuclein is naturally present in the retina, and it has been suggested that early symptoms of the visual system may be used as a biomarker for PD. Here, we use a viral vector to induce a unilateral expression of human wild-type α-synuclein in rats as a mechanistic model of protein aggregation in PD. We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether adeno-associated virus (AAV) mediated expression of human wild-type α-synuclein alter functional activity in the visual system. A total of 16 rats were injected with either AAV-α-synuclein ( n  = 7) or ...

Endogenous pain control mechanisms have long been known to produce analgesia during “flight or fight” situations and to contribute to cognitively driven pain modulation, such as placebo analgesia. Afferent nociceptive information can also directly activate supraspinal descending modulatory systems, suggesting that these mechanisms may participate in feedback loops that dynamically alter the processing of nociceptive information. The functional significance of these feedback loops, however, remains unclear. The phenomenon of offset analgesia—disproportionately large decreases in pain ratings evoked by small decreases in stimulus intensity—suggests that dynamic activation of endogenous pain inhibition may contribute to the temporal filtering of nociceptive information. The neural mechanisms that mediate this phenomenon remain currently unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that several regions of the midbrain and brainstem are differentially activated during offset analgesia. These ac...

A central aim of cognitive and clinical neuroscience is to map structure to function, which will enable the prediction of functional deficits from structural damage. In clinical practice, evidence from post neurosurgical evaluations has underscored the ...

Resisting Apoptosis with Δ Np73 Gregory S. Walsh, Nina Orike, David R. Kaplan, and Freda D. Miller (see pages [9638-9647][1]) Young does not always equal hardy, at least in the case of peripheral neurons. Adult sensory neurons in culture do not require trophic factors for survival, and they can

Extensive brain development and cortical folding occurs in the third trimester of pregnancy in humans. A developmentally plausible theory of cortical growth and maturation proposes that neural connectivity directly leads to cortical folding by exerting ...

Brain [Na+] has been proposed to assess insult duration in evolving stroke (Wang et al, 2000 Stroke 31,1386). Stroke localization and the type of local blood supply may modify this relation. We hypothesized that the time course of [Na+] in cortical stroke (COR) where collateral circulation is present is different than in caudoputamen stroke (CP) where collateral circulation is absent. In Sprague-Dawley rats (~340 g) under isoflurane anesthesia focal ischemia was induced either by occlusion of the distal middle cerebral artery and both common carotid arteries or by insertion of an intraluminal suture through the internal carotid artery. 3D [Na+] data were obtained on a 3 T whole body scanner (GE MS) using a dual-tuned (23Na/1H), dual-quadrature birdcage RF coil. The infarct was located using ADC 1H images. [Na+] maps (twisted projection) were acquired every 5.3 min from which the [Na+] in % change from the average in normal cortex was measured vs. time after occlusion, Ta, in hours. The rate of [Na+] increa...

Introduction: DTI provides detailed information regarding tissue microstructure. In the developing human brain, significant changes in both size and structure occur in the ventricular zone. These changes are due to the developmentally time-locked events...

Low back pain (LBP) is often reported as dull pain in the deep, musculoskeletal system around the lumbar spine. Although the chronic LBP could potentially involve the supraspinal pathology (1), its cerebral substrates have not been defined. We have deve...

The response to painful stimulation depends not only on peripheral nociceptive input but also on the cognitive and affective context in which pain occurs. One contextual variable that affects the neural and behavioral response to nociceptive stimulation is the degree to which pain is perceived to be controllable. Previous studies indicate that perceived controllability affects pain tolerance, learning and motivation, and the ability to cope with intractable pain, suggesting that it has profound effects on neural pain processing. To date, however, no neuroimaging studies have assessed these effects. We manipulated the subjects' belief that they had control over a nociceptive stimulus, while the stimulus itself was held constant. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that pain that was perceived to be controllable resulted in attenuated activation in the three neural areas most consistently linked with pain processing: the anterior cingulate, insular, and secondary somatosensory cortices. Thi...