NeuroImage. Clinical
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Increased frontal sleep slow wave activity in adolescents with major depression.
Sleep slow wave activity (SWA), the major electrophysiological characteristic of deep sleep, mirrors both cortical restructuring and functioning. The incidence of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) substantially rises during the vulnerable developmental phase of adolescence, where essential cortical restructuring is taking place. The goal of this study was to assess characteristics of SWA topography in adolescents with MDD, in order to assess abnormalities in both cortical restructuring and functioning on a local level. ⋯ SWA over frontal brain regions correlated positively with the CDRS-R subscore "morbid thoughts". Self-reported sleep latency was significantly higher in depressed adolescents compared to controls whereas sleep architecture did not differ between the groups. Higher frontal SWA in depressed adolescents may represent a promising biomarker tracing cortical regions of intense use and/or restructuring.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Early grey matter changes in structural covariance networks in Huntington's disease.
Progressive subcortical changes are known to occur in Huntington's disease (HD), a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder. Less is known about the occurrence and cohesion of whole brain grey matter changes in HD. ⋯ Our results suggest that structural covariance might be a sensitive approach to reveal early grey matter changes, especially for premanifest HD.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Neural changes in extinction recall following prolonged exposure treatment for PTSD: A longitudinal fMRI study.
Neurobiological models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) implicate fear processing impairments in the maintenance of the disorder. Specific deficits in extinction recall, the retention of learned extinction, have been demonstrated. While deficient extinction recall, and the associated activation pattern of prefrontal and hippocampal regions, distinguishes individuals with PTSD from controls, research has not yet examined changes following treatment. We examined the behavioral and neural correlates of extinction recall before and after cognitive behavioral treatment of PTSD. ⋯ Prolonged exposure treatment appears to alter neural activation in PTSD patients during recall of fear extinction, and change in extinction recall (measured by SCR) is associated with symptom reduction. We discuss results in the context of neural systems involved in response to affective stimuli.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Disrupted functional connectivity affects resting state based language lateralization.
Pre-operative assessment of language localization and lateralization is critical to preserving brain function after lesion or epileptogenic tissue resection. Task fMRI (t-fMRI) has been extensively and reliably used to this end, but resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) is emerging as an alternative pre-operative brain mapping method that is independent of a patient's ability to comply with a task. We sought to evaluate if language lateralization obtained from rs-fMRI can replace standard assessment using t-fMRI. ⋯ We then tested whether a simpler measure of functional connectivity to the language network has a better relation to t-fMRI based language lateralization. Remarkably, we found that functional connectivity between the language network and the frontal pole, and superior frontal gyrus, as well as the supramarginal gyrus, significantly correlated to task based language lateralization indices in both patients and healthy controls. These findings are consistent with prior work with epilepsy patients, and provide a framework for evaluating language lateralization at rest.