Neuroscience
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Ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury often follows cardiovascular aberrations that predispose the patient to be neurological and cognitive abnormalities. Pharmacological postconditioning (pPoCo) aims to mitigate I/R origin cerebral infarction and neurobehavioral impairment. Protocatechuic acid (PCA) is a natural polyphenol possessing anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. ⋯ Histopathology revealed a decrease in total infarct area (TTC staining) and cortical neuron density by I/R surgery that was attenuated by PCA. Trigonelline antagonized beneficial effects of PCA pPoCo and attenuated Nrf2 pathway in I/R mice model. PCA pPoCo dose-dependently improves neurobehavioral functions against global I/R injury via the Nrf2 mechanism.
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Peripheral nerve injury (PNI) is a common disease that causes the partial loss of sensory, exercise, and autonomic nervous function. In clinical practice, accurate end-to-end neurorrhaphy of the epineurium without tension is the ideal treatment when there is no nerve defect. We have confirmed that peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) can effectively improve nerve regeneration and motor function recovery after PNI. ⋯ We then used TMT labeling quantitative proteomics to explore the underlying mechanism by which PBMCs ameliorated sciatic nerve injury. Results showed that PBMCs regulated 40 differential proteins and the regulated proteins were primarily involved in the complement and coagulation cascade pathways, the notch signaling pathway, the renin angiotensin system, DNA replication, histidine metabolism, β-alanine metabolism, and other types of O-glycan biosynthesis. Immunohistochemical results supported our findings on the changes in expression of Kininogen 1 and Psen1, the relationships between PNI and the notch pathway and the complement and coagulation level pathways.
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Early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal period mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is essential for the delayed disease progression and the improved quality of patients' life. The emerging computer-aided diagnostic methods that combine deep learning with structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) have achieved encouraging results, but some of them are limit of issues such as data leakage, overfitting, and unexplainable diagnosis. In this research, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning approach for automated diagnosis of AD. ⋯ Our approach has been evaluated on two publicly accessible datasets for two classification tasks of AD vs. cognitively normal (CN) and progressive MCI (pMCI) vs. stable MCI (sMCI). The experimental results indicate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, including those using multi-model and three-dimensional (3D) CNN methods. The resultant heatmaps from our approach also highlight the lateral ventricle and some regions of cortex, which have been proved to be affected by AD.
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The medial olivocochlear (MOC) system is thought to be responsible for modulation of peripheral hearing through descending (efferent) pathways. This study investigates the connection between peripheral hearing function and auditory attention tasks of different degrees of difficulty. Peripheral hearing function was evaluated by analyzing the amount of change in otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) by contralateral acoustic stimulation (CAS), a well-known effect of the MOC system. ⋯ There was also no effect on OAE latency, nor was there any difference in noise level or number of rejected trials. However, we observed that the changes in OAEs by CAS for easy and hard tasks were correlated with the magnitude of the P3 wave in the ERP. This suggests there might be some sort of mutual compensation mechanism - presently unknown - between periphery and cortex.