fMRI and gene therapy in adults with CNGB3 mutation.

Achromatopsia is an inherited retinal disease that affects 1 in 30,000-50,000 individuals and is characterised by an absence of functioning cone photoreceptors from birth. This results in severely reduced visual acuity, no colour vision, marked sensitivity to light and involuntary oscillations of the eyes (nystagmus). In most cases, a single gene mutation prevents normal development of cone photoreceptors, with mutations in the CNGB3 or CNGA3 gene being responsible for ∼80 % of all patients with achromatopsia.

The Association Between Prenatal Food Insecurity and Breastfeeding Initiation and Exclusive Breastfeeding Duration: A Longitudinal Study Using Oregon PRAMS and PRAMS-2, 2008-2015.

In the United States, 11.1% of households experience food insecurity; however, pregnant women are disproportionately affected. Maternal food insecurity may affect infant feeding practices, for example, through being a source of chronic stress that may alter the decision to initiate and continue breastfeeding.

A demonstration of cone function plasticity after gene therapy in achromatopsia.

Recent advances in regenerative therapy have placed the treatment of previously incurable eye diseases within arms' reach. Achromatopsia is a severe monogenic heritable retinal disease that disrupts cone function from birth, leaving patients with complete colour blindness, low acuity, photosensitivity and nystagmus. While successful gene-replacement therapy in non-primate models of achromatopsia has raised widespread hopes for clinical treatment, it was yet to be determined if and how these therapies can induce new cone function in the human brain.

Infant Sex-Specific Associations between Prenatal Food Insecurity and Low Birthweight: A Multistate Analysis.

Background: Low birthweight is associated with increased risk of neonatal mortality and adverse outcomes among survivors. As maternal sociodemographic factors do not explain all of the risk in low birthweight, exploring exposures occurring during critical periods, such as maternal food insecurity, should be considered from a life course perspective.

Objectives: To explore the association between prenatal food insecurity and low birthweight, as well as whether or not there may be a sex-specific response using a multistate survey.

Once daily combined inhaled steroid and ultra long-acting bronchodilator prescribing in pediatric asthma: a dual Center retrospective cohort study.

Objective: A high proportion of children and adolescents who have "difficult" or therapy-resistant asthma, are found to have poor adherence to maintenance therapies. Such individuals are thus difficult asthmatics (for reasons of poor adherence) rather than being young people with true difficult asthma. In our centers, once daily ICS/ULABA (Relvar™) is considered if there is an increase in reported interval symptoms, asthma attacks requiring hospital attendance or rescue oral prednisolone, or persistently low lung function despite reported regular use of a twice daily ICS/LABA preparation.

Corrigendum: Visual surround suppression in schizophrenia.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.

Correction: Reduced Crowding and Poor Contour Detection in Schizophrenia Are Consistent with Weak Surround Inhibition.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Correction: Local and Global Limits on Visual Processing in Schizophrenia.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Retrospective cohort study of breast cancer incidence, health service use and outcomes in Europe: a study of feasibility.

Background: Comparisons of outcomes of health care in different systems can be used to inform health policy. The EuroHOPE (European Healthcare Outcomes, Performance and Efficiency) project investigated the feasibility of comparing routine data on selected conditions including breast cancer across participating European countries.

Methods: Routine data on incidence, treatment and mortality by age and clinical characteristics for breast cancer in women over 24 years of age were obtained (for a calendar year) from linked hospital discharge records, cancer and death registers from Finland, the Turin metropolitan area, Scotland and Sweden (all 2005), Hungary (2006) and Norway (2009).

Binocular Therapy for Childhood Amblyopia Improves Vision Without Breaking Interocular Suppression.

Purpose: Amblyopia is a common developmental visual impairment characterized by a substantial difference in acuity between the two eyes. Current monocular treatments, which promote use of the affected eye by occluding or blurring the fellow eye, improve acuity, but are hindered by poor compliance. Recently developed binocular treatments can produce rapid gains in visual function, thought to be as a result of reduced interocular suppression.

Visual Population Receptive Fields in People with Schizophrenia Have Reduced Inhibitory Surrounds.

People with schizophrenia (SZ) experience abnormal visual perception on a range of visual tasks, which have been linked to abnormal synaptic transmission and an imbalance between cortical excitation and inhibition. However, differences in the underlying architecture of visual cortex neurons, which might explain these visual anomalies, have yet to be reported Here, we probed the neural basis of these deficits using fMRI and population receptive field (pRF) mapping to infer properties of visually responsive neurons in people with SZ. We employed a difference-of-Gaussian model to capture the center-surround configuration of the pRF, providing critical information about the spatial scale of the pRFs inhibitory surround.

Local and global limits on visual processing in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia has been linked to impaired performance on a range of visual processing tasks (e.g. detection of coherent motion and contour detection).

Widespread age-related differences in the human brain microstructure revealed by quantitative magnetic resonance imaging.

A pressing need exists to disentangle age-related changes from pathologic neurodegeneration. This study aims to characterize the spatial pattern and age-related differences of biologically relevant measures in vivo over the course of normal aging. Quantitative multiparameter maps that provide neuroimaging biomarkers for myelination and iron levels, parameters sensitive to aging, were acquired from 138 healthy volunteers (age range: 19-75 years).

Larger extrastriate population receptive fields in autism spectrum disorders.

Previous behavioral research suggests enhanced local visual processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here we used functional MRI and population receptive field (pRF) analysis to test whether the response selectivity of human visual cortex is atypical in individuals with high-functioning ASDs compared with neurotypical, demographically matched controls. For each voxel, we fitted a pRF model to fMRI signals measured while participants viewed flickering bar stimuli traversing the visual field.

Perceptual load affects spatial tuning of neuronal populations in human early visual cortex.

Withdrawal of attention from a visual scene as a result of perceptual load modulates overall levels of activity in human visual cortex [1], but its effects on cortical spatial tuning properties are unknown. Here we show attentional load at fixation affects the spatial tuning of population receptive fields (pRFs) in early visual cortex (V1-3) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that, compared to low perceptual load, high perceptual load yielded a 'blurrier' representation of the visual field surrounding the attended location and a centrifugal 'repulsion' of pRFs.

Reduced crowding and poor contour detection in schizophrenia are consistent with weak surround inhibition.

Background: Detection of visual contours (strings of small oriented elements) is markedly poor in schizophrenia. This has previously been attributed to an inability to group local information across space into a global percept. Here, we show that this failure actually originates from a combination of poor encoding of local orientation and abnormal processing of visual context.

Visual surround suppression in schizophrenia.

Compared to unaffected observers patients with schizophrenia (SZ) show characteristic differences in visual perception, including a reduced susceptibility to the influence of context on judgments of contrast - a manifestation of weaker surround suppression (SS). To examine the generality of this phenomenon we measured the ability of 24 individuals with SZ to judge the luminance, contrast, orientation, and size of targets embedded in contextual surrounds that would typically influence the target's appearance. Individuals with SZ demonstrated weaker SS compared to matched controls for stimuli defined by contrast or size, but not for those defined by luminance or orientation.

The neural correlates of crowding-induced changes in appearance.

Object recognition in the peripheral visual field is limited by crowding: the disruptive influence of nearby clutter. Despite its severity, little is known about the cortical locus of crowding. Here, we examined the neural correlates of crowding by combining event-related fMRI adaptation with a change-detection paradigm.

White matter microstructure and cognitive function.

In recent years, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) has been increasingly used to explore the relationship between white matter structure and cognitive function. This technique uses the passive diffusion of water molecules to infer properties of the surrounding tissue. DW-MRI has been extensively employed to investigate how individual differences in behavior are related to variability in white matter microstructure on a range of different cognitive tasks and also to examine the effect experiential learning might have on brain structural connectivity.

Neural correlates of spatial orienting in the human superior colliculus.

A natural visual scene contains more information than the visual system has the capacity to simultaneously process, requiring specific items to be selected for detailed analysis at the expense of others. Such selection and inhibition are fundamental in guiding search behavior, but the neural basis of these mechanisms remains unclear. Abruptly appearing visual items can automatically capture attention, but once attention has been directed away from the salient event, return to that same location is slowed.

Cortical network for gaze control in humans revealed using multimodal MRI.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques allow definition of cortical nodes that are presumed to be components of large-scale distributed brain networks involved in cognitive processes. However, very few investigations examine whether such functionally defined areas are in fact structurally connected. Here, we used combined fMRI and diffusion MRI-based tractography to define the cortical network involved in saccadic eye movement control in humans.

Expert cognitive control and individual differences associated with frontal and parietal white matter microstructure.

Although many functional imaging studies have reported frontal activity associated with "cognitive control" tasks, little is understood about factors underlying individual differences in performance. Here we compared the behavior and brain structure of healthy controls with fighter pilots, an expert group trained to make precision choices at speed in the presence of conflicting cues. Two different behavioral paradigms--Eriksen Flanker and change of plan tasks--were used to assess the influence of distractors and the ability to update ongoing action plans.

Monocular signals in human lateral geniculate nucleus reflect the Craik-Cornsweet-O'Brien effect.

The human visual system has a remarkable ability to accurately estimate the relative brightness of adjacent objects despite large variations in illumination. However, the lightness of two identical equiluminant gray regions can appear quite different when a light-dark luminance transition falls between them. This illusory brightness "filling-in" phenomenon, the Craik-Cornsweet-O'Brien (CCOB) illusion, exposes fundamental assumptions made by the visual system in estimating lightness, but its neural basis remains unclear.

Overlapping functional anatomy for working memory and visual search.

Recent behavioural findings using dual-task paradigms demonstrate the importance of both spatial and non-spatial working memory processes in inefficient visual search (Anderson et al. in Exp Psychol 55:301-312, 2008). Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we sought to determine whether brain areas recruited during visual search are also involved in working memory.