Neuroscience
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Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased susceptibility to inflammatory arthritis. Sensory and sympathetic synovial nerves are critical to the development of inflammatory arthritis and spontaneously degenerate in the early phases of disease. These nerves contain vitamin D receptors and vitamin D influences nerve growth and neurotrophin expression. ⋯ In vitamin D-deficient rats, there were significant reductions in sensory nerves in the intima and sympathetic nerves in the subintima. While there was no significant change in NGF-immunoreactivity, the number of neurturin-expressing mast cells was significantly reduced in the intima, suggesting that intimal reductions in sensory nerves may be related to reductions in neurturin. Vitamin D deficiency therefore may increase susceptibility to inflammatory arthritis by depleting sensory and sympathetic synovial nerves as a result of reduced synovial neurotrophin content.
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Stroke is a leading cause of death and morbidity worldwide, yet effective treatments are lacking. The association of prostaglandin D2 and its DP1 receptor with vasculature and blood propelled us to examine whether the clinically tested DP1 receptor agonist BW245C had beneficial effects following stroke. To determine if BW245C affects basal cerebral blood flow (CBF), C57BL/6 WT and DP1(-/-) mice were given a single i.p. injection of vehicle or BW245C, and CBF was recorded for 2h. ⋯ The significantly higher infarction volume in DP1(-/-) mice remained unchanged with BW245C treatment. Moreover, BW245C preserves hemostasis in non-stroke conditions. Combined, these data suggest that the DP1 receptor is an endogenous target that can rescue the brain following stroke by regulating CBF and hemostasis.
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Epilepsy is a highly common chronic neurological disorder. Although symptomatic treatment is available, 30-40% of epilepsy patients still remain resistant to anti-epileptic drugs. The primary identification and extensive characterization of the pathological substrates underlying epilepsy would facilitate the development of novel treatments, including disease-modifying and anti-epileptogenic therapies. ⋯ Secondly, we review the available approaches for molecular imaging of brain inflammation in general and finally present the current research on the imaging of brain inflammation in patients and experimental models of epilepsy. The current imaging toolbox is limited by the range of neuroinflammatory targets, which can be visualized at present, and in addition, the often indirect approaches used. We believe that research in this field will further advance as highly specific ligands, and producible and practical imaging approaches will become available.
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Increasing evidence indicates that Huntington's disease (HD) produces postural control impairments even before the clinical diagnosis. It has been suggested that postural disorders of HD patients are explained by deficits in the processing and integration of sensory information, but this hypothesis has been under-explored. In the present study, we evaluated the amplitude of the center of pressure (COP) displacement during maximum leaning in four directions (forward, backward, rightward and leftward) and under three sensory conditions (eyes open, eyes closed and eyes closed standing on foam). ⋯ Together, these findings demonstrate that HD reduces the limits of stability even before the clinical disease onset. Furthermore, our results indicate that dynamic postural tasks with high demand for sensorimotor integration and especially the use of proprioception are highly sensitive to early HD disease processes. This dynamic postural task may become a useful biomarker of HD progression.
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Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) is the most common drug-refractory focal epilepsy in adults. Although previous functional and morphological studies have revealed abnormalities in the brain networks of mTLE, the topological organization of the brain white matter (WM) networks in mTLE patients is still ambiguous. In this study, we constructed brain WM networks for 14 left mTLE patients and 22 age- and gender-matched normal controls using diffusion tensor tractography and estimated the alterations of network properties in the mTLE brain networks using graph theoretical analysis. ⋯ Moreover, we found significant between-group differences in the nodal properties in several brain regions, such as the left superior temporal gyrus, left hippocampus, the right occipital and right temporal cortices. The robustness analysis showed that the results were likely to be consistent for the networks constructed with different definitions of node and edge weight. Taken together, our findings may suggest an adverse effect of epileptic seizures on the organization of large-scale brain WM networks in mTLE patients.