Publications by authors named "Jessica Bernard"

Motor abnormalities, including psychomotor slowing, are prevalent in a large proportion of individuals with schizophrenia. While postural control deficits have been observed in this population, the impact of motor abnormalities on postural stability remains unclear. This study aimed to objectively evaluate postural stability in patients with and without psychomotor slowing and healthy controls.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Healthy aging is associated with deficits in cognitive performance and brain changes, including in the cerebellum. Cerebellar communication with the cortex via closed-loop circuits through the thalamus have been established and these circuits are closely related to the functional topography of the cerebellum. In this study, we sought to elucidate relationships between cerebellar structure and function with cognition in healthy aging.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Connectivity of somatosensory cortex (S1) and cerebellum with the motor cortex (M1) is critical for balance control. While both S1-M1 and cerebellar-M1 connections are affected with aging, the implications of altered connectivity for balance control are not known. We investigated the relationship between S1-M1 and cerebellar-M1 connectivity and standing balance in middle-aged and older adults.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aging involves complex biological changes that affect disease susceptibility and aging trajectories. Although females typically live longer than males, they have a higher susceptibility to diseases like Alzheimer's, speculated to be influenced by menopause, and reduced ovarian hormone production. Understanding sex-specific differences is crucial for personalized medical interventions and gender equality in health.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Healthy aging is associated with deficits in cognitive performance and brain changes, including in the cerebellum. Yet, the precise link between cerebellar function/structure and cognition in aging remains poorly understood. We explored this relationship in 138 healthy adults (aged 35-86, 53% female) using resting-state functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI), cerebellar volume, and cognitive and motor assessments in an aging sample.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: The objective of this study is to explore the functional connectivity (FC) of the cerebellum during the storage phase of micturition, through detecting spontaneous blood-oxygen-level dependent signal between the cerebellum and different brain regions using a high-resolution 7 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner.

Materials And Methods: We recruited healthy individuals with no reported history of neurological disease or lower urinary tract (LUT) symptoms. Participants were asked to drink 500 mL of water and then empty their bladders before entering the MRI scanner.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Connectivity of somatosensory cortex (S1) and cerebellum with the motor cortex (M1) is critical for balance control. While both S1-M1 and cerebellar-M1 connections are affected with aging, the implications of altered connectivity for balance control are not known. We investigated the relationship between S1-M1 and cerebellar-M1 connectivity and standing balance in middle-aged and older adults.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The study here explores the link between transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and brain-behavior relationships. We propose that tDCS may indirectly influence the complex relationships between brain volume and behavior. We focused on the dynamics between the hippocampus (HPC) and cerebellum (CB) in cognitive processes, a relationship with significant implications for understanding memory and motor skills.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Understanding behavior in aging has benefited greatly from cognitive neuroscience. Our foundational understanding of the brain in advanced age is based on what now amounts to several decades of work demonstrating differences in brain structure, network organization, and function. Earlier work in this field was focused primarily on the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The cerebellum is recognized as being important for optimal behavioral performance across task domains, including motor function, cognition, and affect. Decades of work have highlighted cerebello-thalamo-cortical circuits, from both structural and functional perspectives. However, these circuits of interest have been primarily (though not exclusively) focused on targets in the cerebral cortex.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Recent research has implicated the cerebellum in Alzheimer's disease (AD), and cerebrocerebellar network connectivity is emerging as a possible contributor to symptom severity. The cerebellar dentate nucleus (DN) has parallel motor and non-motor sub-regions that project to motor and frontal regions of the cerebral cortex, respectively. These distinct dentato-cortical networks have been delineated in the non-human primate and human brain.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: A large epidemic, such as that observed with SARS-CoV-2, seriously challenges available hospital capacity, and this would be augmented by infection of healthcare workers (HCW). Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is a vaccine against tuberculosis, with protective non-specific effects against other respiratory tract infections in vitro and in vivo. Preliminary analyses suggest that regions of the world with existing BCG vaccination programs have lower incidence and mortality from COVID-19.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chronic colonic injury and inflammation pose high risks for field cancerization, wherein injury-associated mutations promote stem cell fitness and gradual clonal expansion. However, the long-term stability of some colitis-associated mutational fields could suggest alternate origins. Here, studies of acute murine colitis reveal a punctuated mechanism of massive, neutral clonal expansion during normal wound healing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The cerebellum is crucial for motor, cognitive, and emotional functions; its decline in aging has led to increased scientific interest due to its role in timing and complex tasks like spatial navigation.
  • Anatomical connections and interactions with the basal ganglia, cerebral cortex, and spinal cord suggest that the cerebellum creates internal models that aid in automatic behaviors; changes in its structure and function with age are linked to mobility and cognitive decline.
  • Neuroimaging studies indicate that age-related cerebellar atrophy correlates with cognitive and motor performance issues, and in conditions like Alzheimer's, cerebellar function declines independently from the cerebral cortex's contributions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The cerebellum is involved in non-motor processing, supported by topographically distinct cerebellar activations and closed loop circuits between the cerebellum and the cortex. Disruptions to cerebellar function and network connectivity in aging or disease may negatively impact prefrontal function and processing. Cerebellar resources may be important for offloading cortical processing, providing crucial scaffolding for normative performance and function.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mast cells (MCs) contribute to the pathogenesis of cholestatic liver diseases (primary sclerosing cholangitis [PSC] and primary biliary cholangitis [PBC]). PSC and PBC are immune-mediated, chronic inflammatory diseases, characterized by bile duct inflammation and stricturing, advancing to hepatobiliary cirrhosis. MCs are tissue resident immune cells that may promote hepatic injury, inflammation, and fibrosis formation by either direct or indirect interactions with other innate immune cells (neutrophils, macrophages/Kupffer cells, dendritic cells, natural killer, and innate lymphoid cells).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Growth factors are essential for maintenance of intestinal health. We previously showed that exogenous neuregulin-4 (NRG4) promotes colonocyte survival during cytokine challenge and is protective against acute models of intestinal inflammation. However, the function(s) of endogenous NRG4 are not well understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Males and females show differential patterns in connectivity in resting-state networks (RSNs) during normal aging, from early adulthood to late middle age. Age-related differences in network integration (effectiveness of specialized communication at the global network level) and segregation (functional specialization at the local level of specific brain regions) may also differ by sex. These differences may be due at least in part to endogenous hormonal fluctuation, such as that which occurs in females during midlife with the transition to menopause when levels of estrogens and progesterone drop markedly.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sex hormones fluctuate over the course of the female lifespan and are associated with brain health and cognition. Thus, hormonal changes throughout female adulthood, and with menopause in particular, may contribute to sex differences in brain function and behavior. Further, sex hormones have been correlated with sleep patterns, which also exhibit sex-specific impacts on the brain and behavior.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Age is accompanied by differences in the organization of functional brain networks, which impact behavior in adulthood. Functional networks become less segregated and more integrated with age. However, sex differences in network segregation declines with age are not well-understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Social deficits are a significant feature among both individuals with psychosis and those at clinical high-risk (CHR) for developing psychosis. Critically, the psychosis risk syndrome emerges in adolescence and young adulthood, when social skill development is being fine-tuned. Yet, the underlying pathophysiology of social deficits in individuals at CHR for psychosis remains unclear.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

While the cerebellum contributes to nonmotor task performance, the specific contributions of the structure remain unknown. One possibility is that the cerebellum allows for the offloading of cortical processing, providing support during task performance, using internal models. Here we used transcranial direct current stimulation to modulate cerebellar function and investigate the impact on cortical activation patterns.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Measuring brain activity during functional MRI (fMRI) tasks is one of the main tools to identify brain biomarkers of disease or neural substrates associated with specific symptoms. However, identifying correct biomarkers relies on reliable measures. Recently, poor reliability was reported for task-based fMRI measures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Risks of early exposure to media violence remain unclear. This study examines typical early childhood violent media exposure and subsequent psychosocial and academic risks.

Methods: Our longitudinal birth cohort comprised 978 girls and 998 boys.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: fopen(/var/lib/php/sessions/ci_sessionkslqmfq023o8p29sde9ebr07vq7hjqpb): Failed to open stream: No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 177

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_start(): Failed to read session data: user (path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Session/Session.php

Line Number: 137

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once