rudyvdbrink/CitationDatabase huggingface dataset:
Stress Resilience is Associated with Hippocampal Synaptoprotection in the Female Rat Learned Helplessness Paradigm.
Neuroscience, 2021

The synaptogenic hypothesis of major depressive disorder implies that preventing the onset of depressive-like behavior also prevents the loss of hippocampal spine synapses. By applying the psychoactive drugs, diazepam and fluoxetine, we investigated whether blocking the development of helpless behavior by promoting stress resilience in the rat learned helplessness paradigm is associated with a synaptoprotective action in the hippocampus. Adult ovariectomized and intact female Sprague-Dawley rats (n = 297) were treated with either diazepam, fluoxetine, or vehicle, exposed to inescapable footshocks or sham stress, and tested in an active escape task to assess helpless behavior. Escape-evoked corticosterone secretion, as well as remodeling of hippocampal spine synapses at a timepoint representing the onset of escape testing were also analyzed. In ovariectomized females, treatment with diazepam prior to stress exposure prevented helpless behavior, blocked the loss of hippocampal spine synapses, and muted the corticosterone surge evoked by escape testing. Although fluoxetine stimulated escape performance and hippocampal synaptogenesis under non-stressed conditions, almost all responses to fluoxetine were abolished following exposure to inescapable stress. Only a much higher dose of fluoxetine was capable of partly reproducing the strong protective actions of diazepam. Importantly, these protective actions were retained in the presence of ovarian hormones. Our findings indicate that stress resilience is associated with the preservation of spine synapses in the hippocampus, raising the possibility that, besides synaptogenesis, hippocampal synaptoprotection is also implicated in antidepressant therapy.
Supporting data on prion protein translocation mechanism revealed by pulling force studies.
Data in brief, 2020

The Prion protein (PrP) is a highly conserved cell surface glycoprotein. To enter the secretory pathway, the PrP precursor relies on the Sec61 complex and multiple accessory factors all gathering at the membrane of the Endoplasmic reticulum (ER). PrP topogenesis results in the formation of different PrP isoforms. Aside from the typical secretory variant (
[The schizophrenic's chilhood].
L'Encephale, 2018

Pathology of adolescence and young adult, schizophrenia can begin in very rare cases during childhood. Two early clinical forms of the disorder have been identified by epidemiological studies: one beginning at the age of 15; the other around 9 years old; While many questions remain unsanswered about the neurobiological and environmental factors - common or distinct - of these two clinical phenotype, both are related to a profoun and lasting alteration of the neurocognitive development whose origin would clearly go back to infancy or to the antenal period. Here we will present a possible story back of schizophrenia in the light of the latest neuroscientific studies in imagery and genetics from adolescence to antenal period.
What psychology and cognitive neuroscience know about the communicative function of memory.
The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2018

Mahr & Csibra (M&C) include interesting ideas about the nature of memory from outside of the field of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. However, the target article's inaccurate claims about those fields limit its usefulness. I briefly review the most serious omissions and distortions of the literature by the target article, including its misrepresentation of event memory, and offer suggestions for forwarding the goal of understanding the communicative function of memory.
Maternal Spirulina supplementation during pregnancy and lactation partially prevents oxidative stress, glial activation and neuronal damage in protein malnourished F1 progeny.
Neurochemistry international, 2020

Protein malnutrition (PMN) is a global health issue but most prevalent in Africa and Asia. It exerts detrimental effect on structural and physiological aspects of hippocampal circuitry. Despite accumulating evidence for PMN induced changes in nervous system, relatively very little is known about how maternal nutritional supplementation during malnutrition affects glial cells and neurons. Herein, we aimed to investigate the effects of maternal Spirulina supplementation against PMN induced oxidative stress, reactive gliosis and neuronal damage in hippocampus of F1 progeny. Three months old healthy Sprague Dawley females (n = 24) were shifted to normoprotein (NC; 20% protein) and low protein (LP; 8% protein) diets 15 days before conception. The NC and LP group females were subdivided into two groups according to Spirulina supplementation (400 mg/kg/b.wt. orally throughout gestation and lactation period): normal control with Spirulina (NC SPI) and low protein with Spirulina supplemented group (LP SPI). F1 progeny born were used in present study. Thus, building on earlier results of ameliorated neurobehavioral and cognitive abilities in Spirulina supplemented protein deprived rats, the present study incorporates neurochemical and morphometric analysis of glial cells and neurons and revealed that maternal Spirulina consumption partially prevented the PMN associated neuropathological alterations in terms of attenuated oxidative brain damage, reduced reactive gliosis and apoptotic cell population, improved dendritic branch complexity with few damaged neurons and enhanced mushroom shaped spine density. The results suggest that cellular changes in hippocampus after PMN are partially restored after maternal Spirulina supplementation and one could envision intervention approaches using Spirulina against malnutrition.
Heroin-induced respiratory depression and the influence of dose variation: within-subject between-session changes following dose reduction.
Addiction (Abingdon, England), 2020

Globally, more than 100 000 people die annually from opioid overdose. Opportunities to study physiological events in at-risk individuals are limited. This study examined variation of opioid dose and impact on respiratory depression in a chronic injecting heroin user at separate time-points during his long-term diamorphine maintenance treatment.
Manipulating Interword and Interletter Spacing in Cursive Script: An Eye Movements Investigation of Reading Persian.
Journal of eye movement research, 2021

Persian is an Indo-Iranian language that features a derivation of Arabic cursive script, where most letters within words are connectable to adjacent letters with ligatures. Two experiments are reported where the properties of Persian script were utilized to investigate the effects of reducing interword spacing and increasing the interletter distance (ligature) within a word. Experiment 1 revealed that decreasing interword spacing while extending interletter ligature by the same amount was detrimental to reading speed. Experiment 2 largely replicated these findings. The experiments show that providing the readers with inaccurate word boundary information is detrimental to reading rate. This was achieved by reducing the interword space that follows letters that do not connect to the next letter in Experiment 1, and replacing the interword space with ligature that connected the words in Experiment 2. In both experiments, readers were able to comprehend the text read, despite the considerable costs to reading rates in the experimental conditions.
Efficacy of Corticosteroids in Patients with SARS, MERS and COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
Journal of clinical medicine, 2020

(1) Background: The use of corticosteroids in critical coronavirus infections, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), or Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has been controversial. However, a meta-analysis on the efficacy of steroids in treating these coronavirus infections is lacking. (2) Purpose: We assessed a methodological criticism on the quality of previous published meta-analyses and the risk of misleading conclusions with important therapeutic consequences. We also examined the evidence of the efficacy of corticosteroids in reducing mortality in SARS, MERS and COVID-19. (3) Methods: PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science were used to identify studies published until 25 April 2020, that reported associations between steroid use and mortality in treating SARS/MERS/COVID-19. Two investigators screened and extracted data independently. Searches were restricted to studies on humans, and articles that did not report the exact number of patients in each group or data on mortality were excluded. We calculated odds ratios (ORs) or hazard ratios (HRs) under the fixed- and random-effect model. (4) Results: Eight articles (4051 patients) were eligible for inclusion. Among these selected studies, 3416 patients were diagnosed with SARS, 360 patients with MERS, and 275 with COVID-19; 60.3% patients were administered steroids. The meta-analyses including all studies showed no differences overall in terms of mortality (OR 1.152, 95% CI 0.631-2.101 in the random effects model,
An Activity-Mediated Transition in Transcription in Early Postnatal Neurons.
Neuron, 2020

The maturation of the mammalian brain occurs after birth, and this stage of neuronal development is frequently impaired in neurological disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia. However, the mechanisms that regulate postnatal brain maturation are poorly defined. By purifying neuronal subpopulations across brain development in mice, we identify a postnatal switch in the transcriptional regulatory circuits that operates in the maturing mammalian brain. We show that this developmental transition includes the formation of hundreds of cell-type-specific neuronal enhancers that appear to be modulated by neuronal activity. Once selected, these enhancers are active throughout adulthood, suggesting that their formation in early life shapes neuronal identity and regulates mature brain function.
Single-Neuron Correlates of Decision Confidence in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe.
Current biology : CB, 2020

The human medial temporal lobe (MTL) has been suggested to play a role in valuation. However, little is known about its role in binary decisions and metacognition. We performed two decision-making tasks while recording from neurons in the human MTL. During a break, subjects consumed their preferred food item to satiation and subsequently repeated both tasks. We identified both a persistent and a transient modulation of the neural activity. Two independent subpopulations of neurons showed a persistent correlation of their firing rates with either decision confidence or reaction times. Importantly, the changes in confidence and reaction time between experimental sets were accompanied by a correlated change in the neural activity, and this correlation lasted as long as it was relevant for the behavioral task. Previous studies have suggested a transient modulation of the neural activity in the human MTL correlated with subjective value. However, in our study, neither subjective value nor unsigned value could explain this transient activity better than the nutritional features of the stimuli, calling into question the role of the human MTL in valuation.
Effect of inter-trials variability on the estimation of cortical connectivity by Partial Directed Coherence.
Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual International Conference, 2015

Partial Directed Coherence (PDC) is a powerful estimator of effective connectivity. In neuroscience it is used in different applications with the aim to investigate the communication between brain regions during the execution of different motor or cognitive tasks. When multiple trials are available, PDC can be computed over multiple realizations, provided that the assumption of stationarity across trials is verified. This allows to improve the amount of data, which is an important constraint for the estimation accuracy. However, the stationarity of the data across trials is not always guaranteed, especially when dealing with patients. In this study we investigated how the inter-trials variability of an EEG dataset affects the PDC accuracy. Effects of density variations and of changes of connectivity values across trials were first investigated with a simulation study and then tested on real EEG data collected from two post-stroke patients during a motor imagery task and characterized by different inter-trials variability. Results showed the effect of different factors on the PDC accuracy and the robustness of such estimator in a range of conditions met in practical applications.
Respiratory cerebrospinal fluid flow is driven by the thoracic and lumbar spinal pressures.
The Journal of physiology, 2020

Respiration plays a key role in the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) around the central nervous system. During inspiration increased venous return from the cranium is believed to draw CSF rostrally. However, this mechanism does not explain why CSF has also been observed to move caudally during inspiration. We show that during inspiration decreased intrathoracic pressure draws venous blood from the cranium and lumbar spine towards the thorax. We also show that the abdominal pressure was associated with rostral CSF displacement. However, a caudal shift of cervical CSF was seen with low abdominal pressure and comparably negative intrathoracic pressures. These results suggest that the effects of epidural blood flow within the spinal canal need to be considered, as well as the cranial blood volume balance, to understand respiratory-related CSF flow. These results may prove useful for the treatment of CSF obstructive pathology and understanding the behaviour of intrathecal drug injections.
Correction to: Nitric Oxide Participates in the Brain Ischemic Tolerance Induced by Intermittent Hypobaric Hypoxia in the Hippocampal CA1 Subfield in Rats.
Neurochemical research, 2018

The order of corresponding author was inadvertently published. Hence, the first and the second corresponding authors should be Min Zhang (hebmuzhangmin@163.com) and Jing-Ge Zhang (zhangjg001@163.com).
Atypical emotion recognition from bodies is associated with perceptual difficulties in healthy aging.
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2019

A range of processes are required for recognizing others' affective states. It is particularly important that we process the perceptual cues providing information about these states. These experiments tested the hypothesis that difficulties with affective state identification in older adults (OAs) arise, at least partly, from deficits in perceptual processing. To this end we presented "point light display" whole body stimuli to healthy OAs and comparison younger adults (YAs) in 3 signal detection experiments. We examined the ability of OAs to recognize visual bodily information-posture and kinematics-and whether impaired recognition of affective states can be explained by deficits in processing these cues. OAs exhibited reduced sensitivity to postural cues (Experiment 1) but not to kinematic cues (Experiment 2) in affectively neutral stimuli. Importantly, they also exhibited reduced sensitivity only to affective states conveyed predominantly through posture (Experiment 3) -that is, the cue they were impaired in perceiving. These findings highlight how affective state identification difficulties in OAs may arise from problems in perceptual processing and demonstrate more widely how it is essential to consider the contribution of perceptual processes to emotion recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Tailored haemodynamic response function increases detection power of fMRI in awake dogs (Canis familiaris).
NeuroImage, 2021

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of awake and unrestrained dogs (Canis familiaris) has been established as a novel opportunity for comparative neuroimaging, promising important insights into the evolutionary roots of human brain function and cognition. However, data processing and analysis pipelines are often derivatives of methodological standards developed for human neuroimaging, which may be problematic due to profound neurophysiological and anatomical differences between humans and dogs. Here, we explore whether dog fMRI studies would benefit from a tailored dog haemodynamic response function (HRF). In two independent experiments, dogs were presented with different visual stimuli. BOLD signal changes in the visual cortex during these experiments were used for (a) the identification and estimation of a tailored dog HRF, and (b) the independent validation of the resulting dog HRF estimate. Time course analyses revealed that the BOLD signal in the primary visual cortex peaked significantly earlier in dogs compared to humans, while being comparable in shape. Deriving a tailored dog HRF significantly improved the model fit in both experiments, compared to the canonical HRF used in human fMRI. Using the dog HRF yielded significantly increased activation during visual stimulation, extending from the occipital lobe to the caudal parietal cortex, the bilateral temporal cortex, into bilateral hippocampal and thalamic regions. In sum, our findings provide robust evidence for an earlier onset of the dog HRF in two visual stimulation paradigms, and suggest that using such an HRF will be important to increase fMRI detection power in canine neuroimaging. By providing the parameters of the tailored dog HRF and related code, we encourage and enable other researchers to validate whether our findings generalize to other sensory modalities and experimental paradigms.
Olfactory Behaviors Assayed by Computer Tracking Of Drosophila in a Four-quadrant Olfactometer.
Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE, 2016

A key challenge in neurobiology is to understand how neural circuits function to guide appropriate animal behaviors. Drosophila melanogaster is an excellent model system for such investigations due to its complex behaviors, powerful genetic techniques, and compact nervous system. Laboratory behavioral assays have long been used with Drosophila to simulate properties of the natural environment and study the neural mechanisms underlying the corresponding behaviors (e.g. phototaxis, chemotaxis, sensory learning and memory)(1-3). With the recent availability of large collections of transgenic Drosophila lines that label specific neural subsets, behavioral assays have taken on a prominent role to link neurons with behaviors(4-11). Versatile and reproducible paradigms, together with the underlying computational routines for data analysis, are indispensable for rapid tests of candidate fly lines with various genotypes. Particularly useful are setups that are flexible in the number of animals tested, duration of experiments and nature of presented stimuli. The assay of choice should also generate reproducible data that is easy to acquire and analyze. Here, we present a detailed description of a system and protocol for assaying behavioral responses of Drosophila flies in a large four-field arena. The setup is used here to assay responses of flies to a single olfactory stimulus; however, the same setup may be modified to test multiple olfactory, visual or optogenetic stimuli, or a combination of these. The olfactometer setup records the activity of fly populations responding to odors, and computational analytical methods are applied to quantify fly behaviors. The collected data are analyzed to get a quick read-out of an experimental run, which is essential for efficient data collection and the optimization of experimental conditions.
[Peripheral Nerve Disease].
Brain and nerve = Shinkei kenkyu no shinpo, 2020

The Diagnostic process of neurological disorders consists of anatomical and etiological diagnoses, and that of neuropathies usually starts with a suspicion of peripheral nerve disturbance based on neurological findings, which is subsequently confirmed by electrophysiology. However, there are numerous pitfalls in interpreting neurological features and electrophysiological data in the anatomical diagnosis process, possibly leading to misdiagnoses of "neuropathy" in patients with myelopathies, myopathies, neuromuscular junction diseases, or motor neuron diseases. We present the case of a 7-year-old girl showing acute flaccid quadriplegia with overt abnormalities in a nerve conduction study who was initially misdiagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. In retrospect, we recognize several points suggestive of disorders other than neuropathy.
Benign and malignant mimickers of infiltrative hepatocellular carcinoma: tips and tricks for differential diagnosis on CT and MRI.
Clinical imaging, 2021

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) may have an infiltrative appearance in about 8-20% of cases. Infiltrative HCC can be a challenging diagnosis and it is associated with the worst overall survival among HCC patients. Infiltrative HCC is characterized by the spread of multiple minute nodules throughout the liver, without a dominant one, ultimately resulting into macrovascular invasion. On CT and MRI, infiltrative HCC appears as an ill-defined, large mass, with variable degree of enhancement, and satellite neoplastic nodules in up to 52% of patients. On MRI, it may show restriction on diffusion weighted imaging, hyperintensity on T2- and hypointensity on T1-weighted images, and, if hepatobiliary agent is used, hypointensity on hepatobiliary phase. Infiltrative HCC must be differentiated from other liver diseases, such as focal confluent fibrosis, steatosis, amyloidosis, vascular disorders of the liver, cholangiocarcinoma, and diffuse metastatic disease. In cirrhotic patients, the identification of vascular tumor invasion of the portal vein and its differentiation from bland thrombosis is of utmost importance for patient management. On contrast enhanced CT and MRI, portal vein tumor thrombosis appears as an enhancing thrombus within the portal vein, close to the main tumor and results into vein enlargement. The aim of this pictorial review is to show CT and MRI features that allow the diagnosis of infiltrative HCC and portal vein tumor thrombosis. A particular point of interest includes the tips and tricks for differential diagnosis with potential mimickers of infiltrative HCC.
COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on Neurosurgery Practice in Malaysia: Academic Insights, Clinical Experience and Protocols from March till August 2020.
The Malaysian journal of medical sciences : MJMS, 2020

The newly discovered coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease introduced to humans for the first time. Following the pandemic of COVID-19, there is a major shift of practices among surgical departments in response to an unprecedented surge in reducing the transmission of disease. With pooling and outsourcing of more health care workers to emergency rooms, public health care services and medical services, further in-hospital resources are prioritised to those in need. It is imperative to balance the requirements of caring for COVID-19 patients with imminent risk of delay to others who need care. As Malaysia now approaches the recovery phase following the pandemic, the crisis impacted significantly on neurosurgical services throughout the country. Various emergency measures taken at the height of the crisis may remain as the new normal in the provision of neurosurgical services and practices in Malaysia. The crisis has certainly put a strain on the effective delivery of services and as we approach the recovery era, what may have been a strain may prove to be a silver lining in neurosurgical services in Malaysia. The following details are various measures put in place as the new operational protocols for neurosurgical services in Malaysia.