Appropriate tourniquet pressure for peripherally inserted central catheter placement in the upper arm.

Purpose: A peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) placement often requires ultrasound guidance. Previous studies using an adult blood pressure cuff have suggested that veins do not easily collapse at the tourniquet pressure from diastolic to systolic blood pressure. When inserting a PICC into the basilic vein of the upper arm, a narrow blood pressure cuff should be used as a tourniquet to avoid concealing the puncture site.

Involvement of bile acid in diarrhoea and therapeutic effect of colestimide in hereditary ATTR amyloidosis.

Background: Diarrhoea is one of the most serious complications in hereditary ATTR (ATTRv) amyloidosis. However, its precise pathomechanism remains unknown. The present study investigated the involvement of bile acid in diarrhoea along with the therapeutic effect of colestimide, a bile acid sequestrant, in ATTRv amyloidosis.

Striosomes control dopamine via dual pathways paralleling canonical basal ganglia circuits.

Balanced activity of canonical direct D1 and indirect D2 basal ganglia pathways is considered a core requirement for normal movement, and their imbalance is an etiologic factor in movement and neuropsychiatric disorders. We present evidence for a conceptually equivalent pair of direct D1 and indirect D2 pathways that arise from striatal projection neurons (SPNs) of the striosome compartment rather than from SPNs of the matrix, as do the canonical pathways. These striosomal D1 (S-D1) and D2 (S-D2) pathways target substantia nigra dopamine-containing neurons instead of basal ganglia motor output nuclei.

Dopamine release plateau and outcome signals in dorsal striatum contrast with classic reinforcement learning formulations.

We recorded dopamine release signals in centromedial and centrolateral sectors of the striatum as mice learned consecutive versions of visual cue-outcome conditioning tasks. Dopamine release responses differed for the centromedial and centrolateral sites. In neither sector could these be accounted for by classic reinforcement learning alone as classically applied to the activity of nigral dopamine-containing neurons.