Search results for "NSC"
showing 10 items of 5810 documents
Cortico-bulbar fibers to orofacial muscles: recordings with enoral surface electrodes.
1997
A new recording technique was developed to eliminate current problems on recording transcranial evoked facial muscle responses. A fork-shaped device equipped with 2 pairs of Ag/AgCl-electrodes was inserted enorally at the buccinator muscle level. Advantages offered by this method comprise clearly defined negative deflection of the compound muscle action potential, lack of relevant volume conduction from adjacent muscles, reliability of amplitude criteria, absence of interfering stimulus artifacts, easy achievement of preactivation, and noninvasive recording by surface electrodes. In 43 healthy subjects transcranial magnetic stimulation evoked contralateral responses at a mean latency and me…
A genetic basis for IFN-gamma production and T-bet expression in humans.
2005
Abstract Th1 and Th2 cytokines secreted by polarized effector T cells play a pivotal role in the development of autoimmune and allergic diseases. However, the genetic basis of cytokine production by T lymphocytes in humans is poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the genetic contribution to cytokine production and regulation of T cell-specific transcription factors in a prospective twin study. We found a substantial genetic contribution to the production of Th1 cytokines such as IFN-γ and TNF-α with heritabilities of 0.85 (95% confidence intervals, 0.74–0.95) and 0.72 (0.50–0.93), respectively, whereas no genetic influence on production of the Th2 signature cytokine IL-4 was obs…
Motor cortex tRNS improves pain, affective and cognitive impairment in patients with fibromyalgia: Preliminary results of a randomised sham-controlle…
2017
Objective. Fibromyalgia (FM) is a clinical syndrome characterised by widespread musculoskeletal pain, chronic fatigue, cognitive deficits, and sleep and mood disorders. The effectiveness of most pharmacological treatments is limited, and there is a need for new, effective and well-tolerated therapies. It has recently been shown that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) of the motor cortex reduces pain, and that tDCS of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) improves anxiety, depression and cognitive impairment in FM patients. The new technique of transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) using randomly changing alternating currents has very recently been shown to improve w…
Role of Circulating miRNAs as Biomarkers in Idiopathic Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension: Possible Relevance of miR-23a
2015
Idiopathic pulmonary hypertension (IPAH) is a rare disease characterized by a progressive increase in pulmonary vascular resistance leading to heart failure. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs that control the expression of genes, including some involved in the progression of IPAH, as studied in animals and lung tissue. These molecules circulate freely in the blood and their expression is associated with the progression of different vascular pathologies. Here, we studied the expression profile of circulating miRNAs in 12 well-characterized IPAH patients using microarrays. We found significant changes in 61 miRNAs, of which the expression of miR23a was correlated with the patients’ …
PGC-1α Induction in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension
2012
Idiopathic Pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH) is characterized by the obstructive remodelling of pulmonary arteries, and a progressive elevation in pulmonary arterial pressure (PAP) with subsequent right-sided heart failure and dead. Hypoxia induces the expression of peroxisome proliferator activated receptorγcoactivator-1α(PGC-1α) which regulates oxidative metabolism and mitochondrial biogenesis. We have analysed the expression of PGC-1α, cytochrome C (CYTC), superoxide dismutase (SOD), the total antioxidant status (TAS) and the activity of glutathione peroxidase (GPX) in blood samples of IPAH patients. Expression of PGC-1αwas detected in IPAH patients but not in healthy volunteers. Th…
Heavy resistance exercise training and skeletal muscle androgen receptor expression in younger and older men
2010
Effects of heavy resistance exercise on serum testosterone and skeletal muscle androgen receptor (AR) concentrations were examined before and after a 21-week resistance training period. Seven healthy untrained young adult men (YT) and ten controls (YC) as well as ten older men (OT) and eight controls (OC) volunteered as subjects. Heavy resistance exercise bouts (5 × 10 RM leg presses) were performed before and after the training period. Muscle biopsies were obtained before and 1h and 48 h after the resistance exercise bouts from m.vastus lateralis (VL) to determine cross-sectional area of muscle fibers (fCSA) and AR mRNA expression and protein concentrations. No changes were observed in YC …
Stability and Change of Personality Across the Life Course: The Impact of Age and Major Life Events on Mean-Level and Rank-Order Stability of the Big…
2011
Does personality change across the entire life course, and are those changes due to intrinsic maturation or major life experiences? This longitudinal study investigated changes in the mean levels and rank order of the Big Five personality traits in a heterogeneous sample of 14,718 Germans across all of adulthood. Latent change and latent moderated regression models provided four main findings: First, age had a complex curvilinear influence on mean levels of personality. Second, the rank-order stability of Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness, and Agreeableness all followed an inverted U-shaped function, reaching a peak between the ages of 40 and 60, and decreasing afterwards, whereas…
Long-term stability in the Big Five personality traits in adulthood
2007
This study investigated the stability of the Big Five personality traits in adulthood from age 33 to 42. Participants (89 men, 103 women) were drawn from the ongoing Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development. The results showed that the mean-level of Neuroticism decreased whereas the mean-level of Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness increased from age 33 to 42. The Structural Equation Modeling analyses revealed both gender differences and similarities in the rank-order stability of the Big Five: Neuroticism and Extraversion were more stable in men than in women, whereas Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousne…
Effect of transcranial direct current stimulation on semantic discrimination eyeblink conditioning
2015
Abstract Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a neuromodulation method that has been used to modulate learning. We tested whether anodal tDCS targeted at the left DLPFC could enhance learning in a semantic variant of discrimination eyeblink conditioning, i.e., whether the stimulation would have a specific effect on the discrimination ability, rate of acquisition, amplitude of the conditioned response (CR), or all of these. Methods Immediately prior to the eyeblink conditioning, the participants received either active stimulation of 1 mA for 10 min or sham stimulation. The anode was placed over F3 and the cathode over the right supraorbital area. The conditioned stimu…
Dysfunctional cortical inhibition in adult ADHD: neural correlates in auditory event-related potentials.
2013
In recent times, the relevance of an accurate diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults has been the focus of several studies. No longer considered a pathology exclusive to children and adolescents, and taking into account its social implications, developing enhanced support tools for the current diagnostic procedure becomes a priority. Here we present a method for the objective assessment of ADHD in adults using chirp-evoked, paired auditory late responses (ALRs) combined with a two-dimensional ALR denoising scheme to extract correlates of intracortical inhibition. Our method allows for an effective single-sweep denoising, thus requiring less trials to obtain r…