Brain structure & function
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Comparative Study
Common hippocampal structural and functional changes in migraine.
The hippocampus is classically involved in memory consolidation, spatial navigation and is involved in the stress response. Migraine is an episodic disorder characterized by intermittent attacks with a number of physiological and emotional stressors associated with or provoking each attack. Given that migraine attacks can be viewed as repeated stressors, alterations in hippocampal function and structure may play an important role in migraine pathophysiology. ⋯ Significant larger bilateral hippocampal volume was found in LF group relative to the HF and HC groups suggestive of an initial adaptive plasticity that may then become dysfunctional with increased frequency. Functional correlates of greater deactivation (LF > HF) in the same hippocampal regions in response to noxious stimulation was also accompanied by overall reduction in functional connectivity of the hippocampus with other brain regions involved in pain processing in the HF group. The results implicate involvement of hippocampus in the pathophysiology of the migraine.
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Hevin, also known as SPARC-like 1, is a member of the secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine family of matricellular proteins, which has been implicated in neuronal migration and synaptogenesis during development. Unlike previously characterized matricellular proteins, hevin remains strongly expressed in the adult brain in both astrocytes and neurons, but its precise pattern of expression is unknown. The present study provides the first systematic description of hevin mRNA distribution in the adult mouse brain. ⋯ Furthermore, hevin transcript was enriched in ribosomes of astrocytes and parvalbumin neurons providing a direct evidence of hevin mRNAs translation in these cell types. This study reveals the unique and complex expression profile of the matricellular protein hevin in the adult brain. This distribution is compatible with a role of hevin in astrocytic-mediated adult synaptic plasticity and in the regulation of network activity mediated by parvalbumin-expressing neurons.
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Comparative Study
Changes in grey matter development in autism spectrum disorder.
Results on grey matter (GM) structural alterations in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are inconclusive. Moreover, little is known about age effects on brain-structure abnormalities in ASD beyond childhood. Here, we aimed to examine regional GM volumes in a large sample of children, adolescents, and adults with ASD. ⋯ Moreover, while GM volume in the right precentral gyrus decreased linearly with age in ASD individuals, GM volume development in controls followed a U-shaped pattern. Based on a large sample, our voxel-based morphometry results on group differences in regional GM volumes help to resolve inconclusive findings from previous studies in ASD. Results on age-related changes of regional GM volumes suggest that ASD is characterized by complex alterations in lifetime trajectories of several brain regions that underpin social-cognitive and motor functions.
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In previous studies (Grécová et al., Eur J Neurosci 29:1921-1930, 2009; Bures et al., Eur J Neurosci 32:155-164, 2010), we demonstrated that after an early postnatal short noise exposure (8 min 125 dB, day 14) changes in the frequency tuning curves as well as changes in the coding of sound intensity are present in the inferior colliculus (IC) of adult rats. In this study, we analyze on the basis of the Golgi-Cox method the morphology of neurons in the IC, the medial geniculate body (MGB) and the auditory cortex (AC) of 3-month-old Long-Evans rats exposed to identical noise at postnatal day 14 and compare the results to littermate controls. In rats exposed to noise as pups, the mean total length of the neuronal tree was found to be larger in the external cortex and the central nucleus of the IC and in the ventral division of the MGB. ⋯ In the AC, the mean total length of the apical dendritic segments of pyramidal neurons was significantly shorter in noise-exposed rats, however, only slight differences with respect to controls were observed in the length of basal dendrites of pyramidal cells as well as in the neuronal trees of AC non-pyramidal neurons. The numerical density of dendritic spines on the branches of pyramidal AC neurons was lower in exposed rats than in controls. These findings demonstrate that early postnatal short noise exposure can induce permanent changes in the development of neurons in the central auditory system, which apparently represent morphological correlates of functional plasticity.
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One of the major challenges of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis is to develop simple and reliable methods to correlate brain regions with functionality. In this paper, we employ a detrending-based fractal method, called detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), to identify brain activity from fMRI data. We perform three tasks: (a) Estimating noise level from experimental fMRI data; (b) Assessing a signal model recently introduced by Birn et al.; and (c) Evaluating the effectiveness of DFA for discriminating brain activations from artifacts. ⋯ This suggests that the proposed algorithm for estimating noise level is very effective and that Birn's model fits our experimental data very well. The brain activation maps for experimental data derived by DFA are similar to maps derived by deconvolution using a widely used software, AFNI. Considering that deconvolution explicitly uses the information about the experimental paradigm to extract the activation patterns whereas DFA does not, it remains to be seen whether one can effectively integrate the two methods to improve accuracy for detecting brain areas related to functional activity.