Neuroscience
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Executive functions, essential for daily life, are known to be impaired in older age. Some executive functions, including working memory updating and value-based decision-making, are specifically sensitive to age-related deterioration. While their neural correlates in young adults are well-described, a comprehensive delineation of the underlying brain substrates in older populations, relevant to identify targets for modulation against cognitive decline, is missing. ⋯ Stepwise linear regression showed that cingulum bundle FA added significant incremental contribution to the variance explained by fronto-angular FC alone. Our findings provide a characterization of distinct functional and structural connectivity correlates associated with performance of specific executive functions. Thereby, this study contributes to the understanding of the neural correlates of updating and decision-making functions in older adults, paving the way for targeted modulation of specific networks by modulatory techniques such as behavioral interventions and non-invasive brain stimulation.
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Music is an important tool for the induction and regulation of emotion. Although learning a sequential motor behaviour is essential to normal motor function, to our knowledge, the role of music-induced emotion on motor learning has not been explored. Our experiment aimed to determine whether listening to different emotional music could influence motor sequence learning. ⋯ Declarative learning, verbal recall of the sequence order, was improved under emotional manipulation, but only for fear-condition. Results suggest that music-induced emotion can influence both sub-components of motor learning in a different way. Music-induced pleasure may have improved motor components of sequence learning by means of increased striatal dopamine availability whereas music-induced fear may facilitate the recruitment of attentional circuits, thus acting on declarative knowledge of the sequence order.
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Ischemic stroke is one of the main causes of serious disability and death worldwide. NLRP3 inflammasome is an intracellular pattern recognition receptor composed of polyprotein complex, which participates in mediating a series of inflammatory responses and is considered as a potential target for the treatment of ischemic stroke. Vinpocetine, a derivative of vincamine, has been widely used in the prevention and treatment of ischemic stroke. ⋯ Vinpocetine can effectively inhibit the apoptosis of peri-infarct neurons, promote the expression of Bcl-2, inhibit the expression of Bax and Cleaved Caspase-3, and reduce the proliferation of peri-infarct microglia. In addition, vinpocetine, like MCC950, can reduce the expression of NLRP3 inflammasome. Therefore, vinpocetine can effectively alleviate the ischemia-reperfusion injury in mice, and the inhibition of NLRP3 inflammasome may be an important therapeutic mechanism of vinpocetine.
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Microglia play an ambiguous role in injury or repair after ischemia-reperfusion, and the induced oxidative stress serves as an important signal, mediates direct toxicity to nerve cells, and eventually simulates complex physiological processes such as activation of microglia to repair the damaged area. Herein, we show that sprouty-related protein with an EVH1 domain 1 (SPRED1) may act as a regulatory node in this phenomenon. The ischemic brain of an ischemia-reperfusion rat model constructed by middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) showed an increase in oxidative stress and downregulation of SPRED1 expression. ⋯ In the absence of H2O2 induction, SPRED overexpression alone did not mediate such an effect. These findings indicate that SPRED1 tends to maintain intracellular homeostasis of signals, but the oxidative stress derived from ischemia-reperfusion can easily degrade SPRED1 and consequently re-activate these restricted signals and alter the behavior of microglia. Thus, our study reveals a novel role of SPRED1 in microglia in response to cerebral ischemia-induced oxidative stress.
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Bipolar disorder may begin as depression or mania, which can affect the treatment and prognosis of bipolar disorder. However, the physiological and pathological differences of pediatric bipolar disorder (PBD) patients with different onset symptoms are not clear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences of clinical, cognitive function and intrinsic brain networks in PBD patients with first-episode depression and first-episode mania. ⋯ And significant associations of brain activity with clinical assessments or cognition were found in different patients. In conclusion, we found differential impairments in cognitive and brain network activation in first-episode depressive and first-episode manic PBD patients, and correlations were found between these impairments. These evidences may shed light on the different developmental paths of bipolar disorder.