Front Hum Neurosci
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Neuroimaging studies have identified a subgroup of patients with a Disorder of Consciousness (DOC) who, while being behaviorally non-responsive, are nevertheless able to follow commands by modulating their brain activity in motor imagery (MI) tasks. These techniques have even allowed for binary communication in a small number of DOC patients. However, the majority of patients who can follow commands are unable to use their responses to communicate. ⋯ Importantly, there was no interaction between the task (CF/AS) and modality (MI/ME). Our results suggest that the neural processes involved in following a motor command or selecting between two motor actions are not dependent on how the response is expressed (via ME/MI). They also suggest a potential neural basis for the distinction in cognitive abilities seen in DOC patients.
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Music listening is associated with both pain- and stress-reducing effects. However, the effects of music listening in daily life remain understudied, and the psycho-biological mechanisms underlying the health-beneficial effect of music listening remain unknown. We examined the effects of music listening on pain and stress in daily life in a sample of women with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS; i.e., a condition characterized by chronic pain) and investigated whether a potentially pain-reducing effect of music listening was mediated by biological stress-responsive systems. ⋯ Music listening in daily life improved perceived control over pain in female FMS patients. Clinicians using music therapy should become aware of the potential adjuvant role of music listening in daily life, which has the potential to improve symptom control in chronic pain patients. In order to study the role of underlying biological mechanisms, it might be necessary to use more intensive engagement with music (i.e., collective singing or music-making) rather than mere music listening.
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Rehabilitative training has shown to improve significantly motor outcomes and functional walking capacity in patients with incomplete spinal cord injury (iSCI). However, whether performance improvements during rehabilitation relate to brain plasticity or whether it is based on functional adaptation of movement strategies remain uncertain. This study assessed training improvement-induced structural brain plasticity in chronic iSCI patients using longitudinal MRI. ⋯ Over time, TBM revealed significant improvement-induced volume increases in the left middle temporal and occipital gyrus, left temporal pole and fusiform gyrus, both hippocampi, cerebellum, corpus callosum, and brainstem in iSCI patients. This study demonstrates structural plasticity at the cortical and brainstem level as a consequence of VR-augmented training in iSCI patients. These structural changes may serve as neuroimaging biomarkers of VR-augmented lower limb neurorehabilitation in addition to performance measures to detect improvements in rehabilitative training.
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Apathy, the major manifestation of impaired goal-directed behavior (GDB), is the most common neuropsychiatric syndrome associated with behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration (bvFTD). The behavioral and biological mechanisms of apathy, however, are not well understood. We hypothesized that GDB has multiple components-including at least initiation, planning and motivation-and that GDB is supported by a network of multiple frontal brain regions. In this study, we examined this hypothesis by evaluating the selective breakdown of GDB in bvFTD, and relating these deficits to gray matter (GM) atrophy and white matter (WM) integrity. ⋯ bvFTD patients have difficulty with initiation, planning and motivation components of GDB. These findings are consistent with the hypotheses that GDB encompasses at least three processes, that these are supported by a large-scale neural network within specific portions of the frontal lobe, and that degradation of any one of these prefrontal regions in bvFTD may contribute to apathy.
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Attention is an important factor that is able to strongly modulate the experience of pain. In order to differentiate cortical mechanisms underlying subject-driven (i.e., top-down) and stimulus-driven (bottom-up) modes of attentional pain modulation, we recorded electric brain activity in healthy volunteers during painful laser stimulation while spatial attention and stimulus intensity were systematically varied. The subjects' task was to evaluate the pain intensity at the attended finger, while ignoring laser stimuli delivered to the other finger. ⋯ Source localization revealed stimulus driven modulation in the cingulate gyrus (CG) and somatosensory areas for gamma power changes. Our results indicate that bottom-up and top-down modes of processing exert different effects on pain-induced slow and fast oscillatory activities. Future studies may examine pain-induced oscillations using this paradigm to test for altered attentional pain control in patients with chronic pain.