Evaluation of Pain-Associated Behavioral Changes in Monoiodoacetate-Induced Osteoarthritic Rats Using Dynamic Weight Bearing Analysis.

Pain is the primary clinical indication of osteoarthritis (OA), and behavioral assessments in rodent pain models are widely used to understand pain patterns. These preclinical pain assessments can also help us to understand the effectiveness of emerging therapeutics for prolonged OA pain management. Along with evoked methods like mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia, non-evoked methods such as dynamic weight bearing (DWB) analysis are valuable tools for behavioral assessments of pain.

Influence of midazolam premedication on intraoperative EEG signatures in elderly patients.

Objective: To investigate the influence of midazolam premedication on the EEG-spectrum before and during general anesthesia in elderly patients.

Methods: Patients aged ≥65 years, undergoing elective surgery were included in this prospective observational study. A continuous pre- and intraoperative frontal EEG was recorded in patients who received premedication with midazolam (Mid, n = 15) and patients who did not (noMid, n = 30).

Neural Dynamics of Autistic Repetitive Behaviors and Fragile X Syndrome: Basal Ganglia Movement Gating and mGluR-Modulated Adaptively Timed Learning.

This article develops the iSTART neural model that proposes how specific imbalances in cognitive, emotional, timing, and motor processes that involve brain regions like prefrontal cortex, temporal cortex, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and cerebellum may interact together to cause behavioral symptoms of autism. These imbalances include underaroused emotional depression in the amygdala/hypothalamus, learning of hyperspecific recognition categories that help to cause narrowly focused attention in temporal and prefrontal cortices, and breakdowns of adaptively timed motivated attention and motor circuits in the hippocampus and cerebellum. The article expands the model's explanatory range by, first, explaining recent data about Fragile X syndrome (FXS), mGluR, and trace conditioning; and, second, by explaining distinct causes of stereotyped behaviors in individuals with autism.

Pharmacodynamic modeling of propofol-induced general anesthesia in young adults.

Target controlled infusion (TCI) of intraveneous anesthetics can assist clinical practitioners to provide improved care for General Anesthesia (GA). Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) models help in relating the anesthetic drug infusion to observed brain activity inferred from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. The parameters in popular population PK/PD models for propofol-induced GA (Marsh and Schnider models) are either verified based on proprietary functions of the EEG signal which are difficult to correlate with the neurophysiological models of anesthesia, or the marker itself needs to be estimated simultaneously with the PD model.