Major depressive disorder is a common and disabling disorder with high rates of treatment resistance. Evidence suggests it is characterized by distributed network dysfunction that may be variable across patients, challenging the identification of quantitative biological substrates. We carried out this study to determine whether application of a novel computational approach to a large sample of high spatiotemporal resolution direct neural recordings in humans could unlock the functional organization and coordinated activity patterns of depression networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The goal of the current study was to examine the dynamics of language lateralization using magnetoencephalographic (MEG) imaging, to determine the sensitivity and specificity of MEG imaging, and to determine whether MEG imaging can become a viable alternative to the intracarotid amobarbital procedure (IAP), the current gold standard for preoperative language lateralization in neurosurgical candidates.
Methods: MEG was recorded during an auditory verb generation task and imaging analysis of oscillatory activity was initially performed in 21 subjects with epilepsy, brain tumor, or arteriovenous malformation who had undergone IAP and MEG. Time windows and brain regions of interest that best discriminated between IAP-determined left or right dominance for language were identified.
Background: 4-bromo-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine (2C-B) is a designer-drug variant of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy) whose recreational use has increased significantly over the last 10 years. Neurologic consequences of 2C-B usage are currently unknown.
Case Report: A 43-year-old woman experienced severe headaches within 48 hours of taking liquid 2C-B, after which time she developed progressive encephalopathy and quadraparesis, which did not improve over several months.