Brain Sciences, Volume 12, Issue 4

Olfactory dysfunction (OD) is a common symptom in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. Moreover, many neurological manifestations have been reported in these patients, suggesting central nervous system involvement. The default mode network (...

Objectives: To investigate the efficacy and safety of an improved ultrasound-guided pulsed radiofrequency (PRF) and nerve block (NB) for patients with pudendal neuralgia (PN). Methods: This retrospective analysis included 88 adults with PN treated in...

There is a relationship between obesity and cognitive functioning. Our aim was to assess weight loss influence on global cognition and executive functioning (EF) in adults with obesity under a multidisciplinary weight loss program. In this six-month...

It is increasingly being understood that perceptual learning involves different types of plasticity. Thus, whereas the practice-based improvement in the ability to perform specific tasks is believed to rely on top-down plasticity, the capacity of sen...

The outbreak of COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) signifies a serious worldwide concern to public health. Both transcriptome and proteome of SARS-CoV-2-infected cells synergize the progression of infectio...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) research has shown great outcome variability in motor performance tasks, with one possible source being sex differences. The goal of this study was to evaluate the effects of estrogen levels on leg muscl...

A major malignant trait of gliomas is their remarkable infiltration capacity. When glioma develops, the tumor cells have already reached the distant part. Therefore, complete removal of the glioma is impossible. Recently, research on the involvement...

Diffuse low-grade gliomas (DLGGs) are heterogeneous and poorly circumscribed neoplasms with isolated tumor cells that extend beyond the margins of the lesion depicted on MRI. Efforts to demarcate the glioma core from the surrounding healthy brain led...

Psychosocial interventions targeting the specific needs of people affected by younger-onset dementia are lacking. Younger-onset dementia refers to dementia where symptom onset occurs at less than 65 years old. Because of its occurrence in middle age,...

The time-sensitive GABA shift from excitatory to inhibitory is critical in early neural circuits development and depends upon developmentally regulated expression of cation-chloride cotransporters NKCC1 and KCC2. NKCC1, encoded by the SLC12A2 gene, r...

Introduction: PTEN gene mutations are frequently found in the genetic landscape of high-grade gliomas since they influence cell proliferation, proangiogenetic pathways, and antitumoral immune response. The present bioinformatics analysis explores the...

Glial neoplasms are a group of diseases with poor prognoses. Not all risk factors are known, and no screening tests are available. Only histology provides certain diagnosis. As already reported, DNA transported by exosomes can be an excellent source...

Exposure to chronic stress leads to disturbances in glucose metabolism in the brain, and changes in the functioning of neurons coexisting with the development of depression. The detailed molecular mechanism and cerebral gluconeogenesis during depress...

Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) therapy is FDA approved and has the CE mark for treatment of newly diagnosed and recurrent glioblastoma. To our knowledge, to date TTFields therapy remains unstudied in glioblastoma patients with multiple sclerosis (M...

Music interventions support functional outcomes, improve mood, and reduce symptoms of depression in neurorehabilitation. Neurologic music therapy (NMT) has been reported as feasible and helpful in stroke rehabilitation but is not commonly part of mul...

Memantine is an FDA approved drug for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. It reduces neurodegeneration in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex through the inhibition of extrasynaptic NMDA receptors in patients and mouse models. Potentially, it...

Having a parent with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias confers a risk for developing these types of neurocognitive disorders in old age, but the mechanisms underlying this risk are understudied. Although the hippocampus is often on...

Respiratory failure, malnutrition, aspiration pneumonia, and dehydration are the precursors to mortality in ALS. Loss of natural communication is considered one of the worst aspects of ALS. This first study to test the feasibility of a music therapy...

Human infants are highly sensitive to social information in their visual world. In laboratory settings, researchers have mainly studied the development of social information processing using faces presented on standard computer displays, in paradigms...

Although researchers have recognized the need to better account for the heterogeneous perceptual speech characteristics among talkers with the same disease, guidance on how to best establish such dysarthria subgroups is currently lacking. Therefore,...

The rehabilitation of cognitive deficits in individuals with traumatic brain injury is essential for promoting patients’ recovery and autonomy. Virtual reality (VR) training is a powerful tool for reaching this target, although the effectivenes...

The participation of silent mating type information regulation 2 homolog 1 (SIRT1) in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has been reported in many studies. However, the role of the expression and function of SIRT1 in the hypothalamus in ALS remains...

It is generally believed that eye movements are completely spared in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Although a series of eye movement abnormalities has been recognized in recent years, the findings are highly controversial, and bulbar disabilit...

Previous studies have reported a relationship between stress and brain activity, and stress has been quantitatively evaluated using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). In the present study, we examined whether a relationship exists between salivary am...

An increasing amount of research has examined the effects of bilingualism on performance in theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Bilinguals outperform monolinguals in ToM when comparing groups. However, it is unclear what aspects of the bilingual experience c...

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a crucial role in adaptive behavior. A wealth of studies suggests obesity-related alterations in the central dopamine system. The most direct evidence for such differences in humans comes from molecular neuro...

Recently, a large cluster-randomized controlled trial was designed—Music Interventions for Dementia and Depression in ELderly care (MIDDEL)—to assess the effectiveness of music interventions on depression in care home residents with demen...

(1) Background: Tinnitus is the awareness of a sound in the absence of an external source. It affects around 10–15% of people, a significant proportion of whom also experience symptoms such as depression or anxiety that negatively affect their...

Speech therapy can be part of the care pathway for patients recovering from comas and presenting a disorder of consciousness (DOC). Although there are no official recommendations for speech therapy follow-up, neuroscientific studies suggest that rele...

This study investigated the characteristics of cognitive impairment in patients with white matter lesions (WMLs) caused by cerebral small vessel disease and the corresponding changes in WM microstructures. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data of 50 pa...

Grounded cognition theory postulates that cognitive processes related to motor or sensory content are processed by brain networks involved in motor execution and perception, respectively. Processing words with auditory features was shown to activate...

Visuo-motor adaptation to optical prisms (Prism Adaptation, PA), displacing the visual scene laterally, is a behavioral method used for the experimental investigation of visuomotor plasticity, and, in clinical settings, for temporarily ameliorating a...

The present study examined whether infants’ crawling experience is related to their sensitivity to fearful emotional expressions. Twenty-nine 9- to 10-month-old infants were tested in a preferential looking task, in which they were presented wi...

Human parenting is a fundamental educational context including complex caregiving tasks finalized to nurture and protect young children [...]

Trait empathy is an essential personality feature in the intricacy of typical social inclinations of individuals. Empathy is likely supported by multilevel neuronal network functioning, whereas local topological properties determine network integrity...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS). Therapy is currently limited to drugs that interfere with the immune system; treatment options that primarily mediate neuroprotection and prevent neurodegene...

Background: Oligoclonal bands represent intrathecal immunoglobulin G (IgG) synthesis and play an important role in the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS). Kappa free light chains (KFLC) are increasingly recognized as an additional biomarker for int...

Temporal connectives play a crucial role in marking the sequence of events during language comprehension. Although existing studies have shown that sentence comprehension can be modulated by temporal connectives, they have mainly focused on languages...

The development of potent and selective therapeutic approaches to glioblastoma (GBM) requires the identification of molecular pathways that critically regulate the survival and proliferation of GBM. Glioblastoma stem-like cells (GSCs) possess stem-ce...

Associative memory (AM) is the ability to remember the relationship between previously unrelated items. AM is significantly affected by normal aging and neurodegenerative conditions, thus there is a growing interest in applying non-invasive brain sti...

(1) Background: Hypofractionated stereotactic radiotherapy (HSRT) and anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibodies have been reported to have a promising survival benefit in recent studies. Anlotinib is a new oral VEGF receptor inhibitor...

The Hubel–Wiesel (HW) model is a classical neurobiological model for explaining the orientation selectivity of cortical cells. However, the HW model still has not been fully proved physiologically, and there are few concise but efficient system...

Dopamine transporter (DAT) is involved in dopamine (DA) reuptake in presynaptic terminals. Deletion of DAT results in a hyperdopaminergic KO-rat phenotype. To conduct our studies in heterozygous DAT rats, several pedigree lines were created, with kno...

Virtual Reality (VR) emerges as a promising technology capable of creating different scenarios in which the body, environment, and brain are closely related, proving enhancements in the diagnosis and treatment of several spatial memory deficits. In r...

Humans are the only species capable of experiencing pleasure from esthetic stimuli, such as art and music. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a critical role in esthetic judgments, both in music...

Social species perceive emotion via extracting diagnostic features of body movements. Although extensive studies have contributed to knowledge on how the entire body is used as context for decoding bodily expression, we know little about whether spec...

The present electroencephalography (EEG) study observed how the brain processes visual stimuli (words and shapes) displayed with four different duration times (17 ms, 33 ms, 67 ms, and 100 ms). All stimuli had to be classified into “I saw nothi...

A common approach to cognitive intervention for adults is memory strategy training, but limited work of this type has examined intervention effects in relation to self-regulation (e.g., strategy usage, memory beliefs) and few have established near tr...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive age-related movement disorder caused by dopaminergic neuron loss in the substantia nigra. Diffusion-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies—namely, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)—have...

Previous studies have shown that immunological factors are involved in the pathogenesis of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The present study examined whether immunological abnormalities are associated with cognitive and behavioral deficits in child...