Behavioral neuroscience
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Behavioral neuroscience · Apr 2013
Impaired recognition of prosody and subtle emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease.
Accurately recognizing the emotional states of others is crucial for successful social interactions and social relationships. Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) have shown deficits in emotional recognition abilities although findings have been inconsistent. This study examined recognition of emotions from prosody and from facial emotional expressions with three levels of subtlety, in 30 individuals with PD (without dementia) and 30 control participants. ⋯ Furthermore how well PD participants identified happy expressions conveyed by either face or voice was strongly related to accuracy in the other modality. This suggests dysfunction of overlapping components of the circuitry processing happy expressions in PD. This study demonstrates the usefulness of including subtle expressions of emotion, likely to be encountered in everyday life, when assessing recognition of facial expressions.
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Behavioral neuroscience · Apr 2013
ReviewCortico-basal ganglia and cortico-cerebellar circuits in Parkinson's disease: pathophysiology or compensation?
The basal ganglia and the cerebellum are anatomically and functionally linked to the cerebral cortex through a series of well-established circuits. The disruption of dopaminergic projections in Parkinson's disease (PD) leads to an imbalance within these circuits, leading to motor and cognitive symptoms. ⋯ This paper will review the anatomy, interaction and function of the CBG and CC circuits, the pathophysiological, metabolic, and functional changes observed in PD, as well as the effect of levodopa and deep brain stimulation on these changes. We will use this framework to discuss the pathophysiological and compensatory mechanisms behind CBG and CC circuit activity in PD.
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Behavioral neuroscience · Apr 2013
Inhibition of HCN channels within the periaqueductal gray attenuates neuropathic pain in rats.
Peripheral and spinal hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated cation (HCN) channels play important roles in neuropathic pain by regulating neuronal excitability. However, the participation of HCN channels in the ventral-lateral periaqueductal gray (vlPAG) during neuropathic pain states has not been clarified. ⋯ Subsequently, the function of these upregulated channels was verified by the intravlPAG infusion of ZD7288, a specific HCN blocker, which significantly relieved mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia in CCI animals. These results suggest that the upregulation of vlPAG HCN channels plays an important role in pain maintenance and might be a target for attenuating pain.