Neuroscience
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Tastes and odors influence the perception of a meal. Especially food aromas can act as potent signals to modulate our eating behavior with strong dependency on the reward produced by food. In this investigation we aimed to study the electrophysiological response to food- and non-food-related odors in healthy volunteers. Analyses revealed specific scalp potential maps for the two conditions; in particular the source of the map in the "food" condition seemed to be associated with the processing of rewards; the specific map in the "non-food" condition reflects odor characteristics excluding the reward.
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Two major neurotrophic factors, nerve growth factor (NGF) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) are involved in a number of physiological processes associated with neuronal growth, survival and plasticity. There are an increasing number of papers demonstrating their ability to serve as neuroprotective molecules under various pathological conditions. At the same time, it remains unclear whether both NGF and BDNF have similar roles under pathological conditions and their effects on the electrophysiological properties of neurons after acute pathogen exposure. ⋯ One week after virus injection acute brain slices were incubated with beta-amyloid (25-35) for 1h and afterward in vitro LTP induction was performed in medial perforant path-DG synapses. We demonstrate that chronic elevation of NGF but not BDNF concentration protects LTP induction from beta-amyloid action. Further inhibitory analysis suggests that the effect of NGF is mediated by PI3K-signaling cascade.
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Cerebral malaria (CM) is a severe complication resulting from Plasmodium falciparum infection that might cause permanent neurological deficits. Cannabidiol (CBD) is a nonpsychotomimetic compound of Cannabis sativa with neuroprotective properties. In the present work, we evaluated the effects of CBD in a murine model of CM. ⋯ On 5dpi, TNF-α and IL-6 increased in the hippocampus, while only IL-6 increased in the prefrontal cortex. CBD treatment resulted in an increase in BDNF expression in the hippocampus and decreased levels of proinflammatory cytokines in the hippocampus (TNF-α) and prefrontal cortex (IL-6). Our results indicate that CBD exhibits neuroprotective effects in CM model and might be useful as an adjunctive therapy to prevent neurological symptoms following this disease.
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Our understanding of the role of somatosensory feedback in regulating motility during chicken embryogenesis and fetal development in general has been hampered by the lack of an approach to selectively alter specific sensory modalities. In adult mammals, pyridoxine overdose has been shown to cause a peripheral sensory neuropathy characterized by a loss of both muscle and cutaneous afferents, but predominated by a loss of proprioception. We have begun to explore the sensitivity of the nervous system in chicken embryos to the application of pyridoxine on embryonic days 7 and 8, after sensory neurons in the lumbosacral region become post-mitotic. ⋯ Therefore, pyridoxine causes a peripheral sensory neuropathy in embryonic chickens largely consistent with its effects in adult mammals. However, the lesion may be more restricted to proprioception in the chicken embryo. Therefore, pyridoxine lesion induced during embryogenesis in the chicken embryo can be used to assess how the loss of sensation, largely proprioception, alters spontaneous embryonic motility and subsequent motor development.
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Previous studies have established the importance of the fronto-parietal brain network in the information processing of reasoning. At the level of cortical source analysis, this eletroencepalogram (EEG) study investigates the functional reorganization of the theta-band (4-8Hz) neurocognitive network of mathematically gifted adolescents during deductive reasoning. ⋯ Further correlation analyses have shown that the enhanced workspace configuration with respect to the global topological metrics of the theta network in math-gifted subjects is correlated with the intensive frontal midline theta (fm theta) response that is related to strong neural effort for cognitive events. These results suggest that by investing more cognitive resources math-gifted adolescents temporally mobilize an enhanced task-related global neuronal workspace, which is manifested as a highly integrated fronto-parietal information processing network during the reasoning process.