Restricted language access during childhood affects adult brain structure in selective language regions.

Due to the ubiquitous nature of language in the environment of infants, how it affects the anatomical structure of the brain language system over the lifespan is not well understood. In this study, we investigated the effects of early language experience on the adult brain by examining anatomical features of individuals born deaf with typical or restricted language experience in early childhood. Twenty-two deaf adults whose primary language was American Sign Language and were first immersed in it at ages ranging from birth to 14 y participated.

The Cortical Organization of Syntactic Processing Is Supramodal: Evidence from American Sign Language.

Areas within the left-lateralized neural network for language have been found to be sensitive to syntactic complexity in spoken and written language. Previous research has revealed that these areas are active for sign language as well, but whether these areas are specifically responsive to syntactic complexity in sign language independent of lexical processing has yet to be found. To investigate the question, we used fMRI to neuroimage deaf native signers' comprehension of 180 sign strings in American Sign Language (ASL) with a picture-probe recognition task.

Effects of Early Language Deprivation on Brain Connectivity: Language Pathways in Deaf Native and Late First-Language Learners of American Sign Language.

Previous research has identified ventral and dorsal white matter tracts as being crucial for language processing; their maturation correlates with increased language processing capacity. Unknown is whether the growth or maintenance of these language-relevant pathways is shaped by language experience in early life. To investigate the effects of early language deprivation and the sensory-motor modality of language on white matter tracts, we examined the white matter connectivity of language-relevant pathways in congenitally deaf people with or without early access to language.

Neurolinguistic processing when the brain matures without language.

The extent to which development of the brain language system is modulated by the temporal onset of linguistic experience relative to post-natal brain maturation is unknown. This crucial question cannot be investigated with the hearing population because spoken language is ubiquitous in the environment of newborns. Deafness blocks infants' language experience in a spoken form, and in a signed form when it is absent from the environment.

Renal sympathetic nerve denervation using intraluminal ultrasound within a cooling balloon preserves the arterial wall and reduces sympathetic nerve activity.

Aims: Circumferential ablation of renal sympathetic nerves using catheter-based ultrasound energy was studied in a preclinical in vivo model. The aim was to investigate the benefit of cooling the arterial wall and the extent of renal nerve injury based on histopathology, and to correlate the injury with kidney norepinephrine levels.

Methods And Results: Computer simulations of the ultrasound transducer within the cooling balloon demonstrated a circumferentially uniform heating profile.

Controlled circumferential renal sympathetic denervation with preservation of the renal arterial wall using intraluminal ultrasound: a next-generation approach for treating sympathetic overactivity.

Aims: The Paradise Ultrasound Renal Denervation System is a next-generation catheter-based device which was used to investigate whether the target ablation area can be controlled by changing ultrasound energy and duration to optimise nerve injury while preventing damage to the arterial wall.

Methods And Results: Five ultrasound doses were tested in a thermal gel model. Catheter-based ultrasound denervation was performed in 15 swine (29 renal arteries) to evaluate five different doses in vivo, and animals were euthanised at seven days for histopathologic assessment.

Resetting of brain dynamics: epileptic versus psychogenic nonepileptic seizures.

We investigated the possibility of differential diagnosis of patients with epileptic seizures (ES) and patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) through an advanced analysis of the dynamics of the patients' scalp EEGs. The underlying principle was the presence of resetting of brain's preictal spatiotemporal entrainment following onset of ES and the absence of resetting following PNES. Long-term (days) scalp EEGs recorded from five patients with ES and six patients with PNES were analyzed.

Nuclear reprogramming by cell fusion.

The use of cell fusion to study exchange of information at the molecular level between the nucleus and the cytoplasm of cells during regulation of gene expression was pioneered by Harris and Ringertz more than three decades ago. The ability to make heterokaryons with cells from different species or genetic strains is especially useful because genetic differences in gene products allow the origin of trans-acting regulatory factors to be determined. Heterokaryons between adult nucleated erythroid cells of one species and embryonic/larval nucleated erythroid cells of another species, for example, show cross-induction between the two types of nuclei, resulting in reprogramming of the adult nucleus to embryonic/larval globin gene expression and/or reprogramming of the embryonic/larval cell nucleus to adult globin expression.