Neuroscience
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Epilepsy is a neurological disorder with a high prevalence worldwide. Several studies carried out during the last decades indicate that the administration of cannabinoids as well as the activation of the endocannabinoid system (ECS) represent a therapeutic strategy to control epilepsy. ⋯ The present review is focused to present findings supporting this issue. According to the current discrepancies, it is relevant to elucidate the different effects induced by the activation of ECS and determine the conditions under which it facilitates the seizure activity.
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Clinical investigations to date have proposed the possibility that exposure to anesthetics is associated with neurodevelopmental deficits. Sevoflurane is the most commonly used general anesthetic in pediatric patients. Animal studies have demonstrated that multiple exposures to sevoflurane during the postnatal period resulted in neuropathological brain changes and long-term cognitive deficits. ⋯ The males had 35 hypermethylated genes, and some physiological processes related to the regulation of synaptic structure were enriched. Rhesus macaques are genetically closer to human beings. Our findings can help in the study of the mechanism of sevoflurane-relevant neurodevelopmental deficits at the posttranscriptional level and can provide new insights into potential clinical preventions and interventions for the neurotoxicity of neonatal anesthesia exposure.
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Cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) is caused by reperfusion following ischemia. Mitophagy is closely related to cerebral IRI. Mitophagy disorder or excess may be harmful and lead to neuronal apoptosis. ⋯ Our research found that knockdown PRDX6 increased the expression of mitophagy-related and apoptosis-related proteins. Knocking down PINK1 relieved mitophagy and apoptosis caused by knocking down PRDX6. In conclusion, knockdown of PRDX6 could aggravate cerebral IRI by enhancing PINK1/PARKIN pathway mediated mitophagy, and this effect could increase neuronal apoptosis.
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Aquaporins (AQPs) play critical physiological roles in water balance in the central nervous system (CNS). Aquaporin-4 (AQP4), the principal aquaporin expressed in the CNS, has been implicated in the processing of sensory and pain transmission. Akt signaling is also involved in pain mediation, such as neuroinflammatory pain and bone cancer pain. ⋯ Furthermore, Akt blockade with MK2206 alleviated NP in the early and late phases after SNL. These results elucidate the mechanisms involved in the roles of Akt/AQP4 signaling in the development and maintenance of NP. AQP4 is likely to be a novel therapeutic target for NP management.
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Spontaneous neural oscillations are key predictors of perceptual decisions to bind multisensory signals into a unified percept. Research links decreased alpha power in the posterior cortices to attention and audiovisual binding in the sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI) paradigm. This suggests that controlling alpha oscillations would be a way of controlling audiovisual binding. ⋯ Exploratory analyses showed that neurofeedback training effects were present for illusion trials with the lowest numeric disparity (i.e., 2 beeps and 1 flash trials) only if the previous trial had high congruency (2 beeps and 2 flashes). Our data suggest that the relation between parietal alpha power (an index of attention) and its effect on audiovisual binding is dependent on the learned causal structure in the previous stimulus. The present results suggests that low alpha power biases observers towards audiovisual binding when they have learned that audiovisual signals originate from a common origin, consistent with a Bayesian causal inference account of multisensory perception.