Publications by authors named "Diehl Maria"

Actively avoiding danger is necessary for survival. Most research on active avoidance has focused on the behavioral and neurobiological processes when individuals learn to avoid alone, within a solitary context. Therefore, little is known about how social context affects active avoidance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aversive learning can produce a wide variety of defensive behavioral responses depending on the circumstances, ranging from reactive responses like freezing to proactive avoidance responses. While most of this initial learning is behaviorally supported by an expectancy of an aversive outcome and neurally supported by activity within the basolateral amygdala, activity in other brain regions become necessary for the execution of defensive strategies that emerge in other aversive learning paradigms such as active avoidance. Here, we review the neural circuits that support both reactive and proactive defensive behaviors that are motivated by aversive learning, and identify commonalities between the neural substrates of these distinct (and often exclusive) behavioral strategies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Calciphylaxis is a serious vascular disorder leading to skin necrosis, commonly associated with renal failure, but also occurs without it, showing a significant historical mortality rate that has recently decreased to 40%.
  • A retrospective study from 2011 to 2019 at a Buenos Aires hospital reviewed 39 patients, revealing a predominance of men and a high prevalence of conditions like hypertension, obesity, and diabetes among the patients.
  • Most diagnoses were confirmed with a single biopsy, and while treatment was multimodal, the one-year mortality rate remained high at 42%.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Active avoidance is essential for survival, but most studies have focused on how individuals act alone, leaving gaps in understanding the influence of social context on this behavior.
  • In experiments with rats, it was found that those trained with a social partner showed more freezing behavior and less active avoidance compared to those trained alone, with notable gender differences in responses under solitary conditions.
  • The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a key role in mediating avoidance responses, and manipulating this brain region affected avoidance differently in males and females, highlighting the need for further research on how these mechanisms differ by sex, especially in relation to anxiety disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Calciphylaxis is a rare disease characterized by calcification of the middle layer of small arteries and arterioles, causing secondary cuta-neous ischemia. The diagnosis is clinical but may be confirmed by histological examination. The optimal treatment is not exactly known, although there is consensus that a multifactorial approach is required.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * A working group of experts from Argentina conducted systematic reviews, finding that many clinical trials did not specify BMD thresholds, while patients' T-scores mostly ranged from -1.6 to -2.0.
  • * The expert panel agreed that a T-score of ≤-1.7 is the most suitable threshold for treatment in postmenopausal women and men over 50 on GC therapy, although other fracture risk factors should also be considered.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to create a framework for healthcare professionals to effectively prevent and treat glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis (GIO) in postmenopausal women and men aged 50 or older who are undergoing glucocorticoid therapy.
  • The expert panel employed a structured approach (PICO) and used GRADE methodology for a systematic literature review, producing 17 recommendations and 8 general principles for evaluating and treating patients at risk of GIO.
  • The guidelines emphasize the importance of monitoring bone health, managing lifestyle factors, and preventing fragility fractures, with the ultimate goal of maintaining or improving bone mineral density in affected patients.*
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: Age expectancy has significantly increased over the last 50 years, as well as some age-related health conditions such as hip fractures. The development of hip fracture registries has shown enhanced patient outcomes through quality improvement strategies. The development of the Argentinian Hip Fracture Registry is going in the same direction.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Evidence has suggested that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) processes social stimuli, including faces and vocalizations, which are essential for communication. Features embedded within audiovisual stimuli, including emotional expression and caller identity, provide abundant information about an individual's intention, emotional state, motivation, and social status, which are important to encode in a social exchange. However, it is unknown to what extent the VLPFC encodes such features.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: A common symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder is the persistent avoidance of cues incorrectly associated with negative outcomes. This maladaptation becomes increasingly evident as subjects fail to respond to extinction-based treatments such as exposure-with-response prevention therapy. While previous studies have highlighted the role of the insular-orbital cortex in fine-tuning avoidance-based decisions, little is known about the projections from this area that might modulate compulsive-like avoidance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Acanthamoeba spp. are among the most worldwide prevalent protozoa. It is the causative agent of a disease known as Acanthamoeba keratitis, a painful and severe sight-threatening corneal infection that can lead to blindness.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • An alternative method for cloning amoebas is introduced, which involves scraping cells from agar.
  • The cells are then placed in a new agar medium divided into isolated squares to prevent them from mixing.
  • This technique improves the reliability of cloning and allows for better quality control during the process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The prefrontal cortex (PFC) helps process information to guide decision-making, especially when faced with competing motivations like seeking food versus avoiding danger.
  • In an experiment with rats, researchers found that specific brain regions (PL PFC, BLA, and VS) are crucial for avoiding a footshock while trying to access a food reward.
  • Using techniques to manipulate the activity of neurons in these regions, they discovered that stimulating different pathways affected the rats' decision to avoid the shock, indicating complex interactions between the PFC, amygdala, and striatum in decision-making under conflict.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study examines how prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns affected hip fracture cases, focusing on two groups: patients treated before and during the lockdown.
  • Researchers found that patients during the lockdown had higher frailty and lower activity levels, leading to a higher rate of surgical interventions and mortality.
  • Logistic regression indicated that frailer patients and those with thromboembolic events faced a significantly increased risk of death, signifying a notable change in hip fracture epidemiology due to the pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Pneumonia caused by opportunistic fungi is a serious complication in immunocompromised patients. Hypercalcemia has been described in renal transplantation associated with Pneumocystis jirovecii (PJP) or Histoplasma capsulatum (HCP) pneumonia.

Methods: We describe 5 patients who underwent kidney transplant between 2014 and 2019 and developed hypercalcemia before the diagnosis of pulmonary fungal infection: 4 patients with PJP and 1 with HCP.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Every day we are bombarded by stimuli that must be assessed for their potential for harm or benefit. Once a stimulus is learned to predict harm, it can elicit fear responses. Such learning can last a lifetime but is not always beneficial for an organism.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Traditional active avoidance tasks have advanced the field of aversive learning and memory for decades and are useful for studying simple avoidance responses in isolation; however, these tasks have limited clinical relevance because they do not model several key features of clinical avoidance. In contrast, platform-mediated avoidance (PMA) more closely resembles clinical avoidance because the response i) is associated with an unambiguous safe location, ii) is not associated with an artificial termination of the warning signal, and iii) is associated with a decision-based appetitive cost. Recent findings on the neuronal circuits of PMA have confirmed that amygdala-striatal circuits are essential for avoidance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Researchers studied how different brain circuits are involved in anxiety-related behaviors, specifically focusing on active avoidance rather than just conditioned fear responses.
  • - They found that inactivating the prelimbic prefrontal cortex (PL) slowed down avoidance behaviors, but silencing certain neurons in that area did not have the same effect.
  • - The study revealed that inhibitory signals from specific rostral PL neurons are crucial for recognizing avoidable threats, suggesting that understanding neuronal activity is important for future behavioral studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cortical glutamatergic projections are extensively studied in behavioral neuroscience, whereas cortical GABAergic projections to downstream structures have been overlooked. A recent study by Lee and colleagues (Lee AT, Vogt D, Rubenstein JL, Sohal VS. J Neurosci 34: 11519-11525, 2014) used optogenetic and electrophysiological techniques to characterize a behavioral role for long-projecting GABAergic neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Social communication relies on the integration of auditory and visual information, which are present in faces and vocalizations. Evidence suggests that the integration of information from multiple sources enhances perception compared with the processing of a unimodal stimulus. Our previous studies demonstrated that single neurons in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) of the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) respond to and integrate conspecific vocalizations and their accompanying facial gestures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Association of dysregulated calcium homeostasis and granulomatous disease is well established. There exist reports in the literature of granulomatous reactions produced by silicones associated with hypercalcemia. In this case series we report four young women that underwent methacrylate injections in gluteus, thighs and calves that developed granulomas with posterior appearance of hypercalcemia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Reports of atypical femoral fractures (AFFs) in patients receiving long- term bisphosphonate therapy have raised concerns regarding the genesis of this rare event. Using high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT), we conducted a study to evaluate bone microarchitecture in patients who had suffered an AFF during long-term bisphosphonate treatment. The aim of our study was to evaluate if bone microarchitecture assessment could help explain the pathophysiology of these fractures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Osteoporosis is a constantly growing disease which affects over 200 million people worldwide. The present recommendations are guidelines for its diagnosis, prevention and treatment, but they do not constitute standards for clinical decisions in individual patients. The physician must adapt them to individual patients and special situations, incorporating personal factors that transcend the limits of these guidelines and are dependent on the knowledge and art of the physician.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF