Pediatric Cervical Spine Trauma: Injury Patterns, Diagnosis, and Treatment.

Background: Traumatic injuries to the cervical spine or spinal cord are uncommon pathologies in the pediatric population. As injury severity is disproportionately higher among children due to significant risk for debilitating long-term disability, traumatic spinal fractures in children raise greater clinical concern than comparable injuries in adults.

Summary: Unlike adults, children possess unique features such as incomplete ossification of vertebrae, synchondroses, pseudo-subluxation, horizontal alignment of ligaments, and absence of lordosis, which results in greater mobility and flexibility in the pediatric spine.

Targeting Accuracy and Clinical Outcomes of Awake versus Asleep Interventional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Guided Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson's Disease: The University of California, San Francisco Experience.

Background: Interventional MRI (iMRI)-guided implantation of deep brain stimulator (DBS) leads has been developed to treat patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) without the need for awake testing.

Objective: Direct comparisons of targeting accuracy and clinical outcomes for awake stereotactic with asleep iMRI-DBS for PD are limited.

Methods: We performed a retrospective review of patients with PD who underwent awake or iMRI-guided DBS surgery targeting the subthalamic nucleus or globus pallidus interna between 2013 and 2019 at our institution.

Tonic activity in lateral habenula neurons acts as a neutral valence brake on reward-seeking behavior.

Survival requires both the ability to persistently pursue goals and the ability to determine when it is time to stop, an adaptive balance of perseverance and disengagement. Neural activity in the lateral habenula (LHb) has been linked to negative valence, but its role in regulating the balance between engaged reward seeking and disengaged behavioral states remains unclear. Here, we show that LHb neural activity is tonically elevated during minutes-long periods of disengagement from reward-seeking behavior, both when due to repeated reward omission (negative valence) and when sufficient reward has been consumed (positive valence).

Management of migrating intracranial bullet fragments in a 13-year-old female after firearm brain injury: technical and surgical nuances.

Introduction: We present the challenges and nuances of management in a rare case of multiple migrating intracranial fragments after pediatric gunshot wound to the head (GSWH).

Case Presentation: A 13-year-old girl suffered left parietal GSWH, with new neurologic decline 3 days after initial debridement. Serial imaging showed the largest intracranial fragments had migrated into the left trigone, and descended further with head of bed (HOB) elevation.

A Case of Torticollis in an 8-Month-Old Infant Caused by Posterior Fossa Arachnoid Cyst: An Important Entity for Differential Diagnosis.

Torticollis is a clinical diagnosis with heterogeneous causes. We present an unusual case of acquired torticollis in an 8-month-old female infant with a large cerebellopontine angle arachnoid cyst. Symptoms resolved after surgical fenestration.

Circuit and molecular architecture of a ventral hippocampal network.

The ventral hippocampus (vHPC) is a critical hub in networks that process emotional information. While recent studies have indicated that ventral CA1 (vCA1) projection neurons are functionally dissociable, the basic principles of how the inputs and outputs of vCA1 are organized remain unclear. Here, we used viral and sequencing approaches to define the logic of the extended vCA1 circuit.