Identifying brain targets for real-time fMRI neurofeedback in chronic pain: insights from functional neurosurgery.

Background: The lack of clearly defined neuromodulation targets has contributed to the inconsistent results of real-time fMRI-based neurofeedback (rt-fMRI-NF) for the treatment of chronic pain. Functional neurosurgery (funcSurg) approaches have shown more consistent effects in reducing pain in patients with severe chronic pain.

Objective: This study aims to redefine rt-fMRI-NF targets for chronic pain management informed by funcSurg studies.

Neural and gaze pattern responses to happy faces in autism: Predictors of adaptive difficulties and re-evaluation of the social motivation hypothesis.

Background: The "Social Motivation" hypothesis posits that social deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) arise from altered reward perception. However, few studies have examined neural and behavioral responses to social reward-related cues in low functioning ASD children with limited cognitive or language abilities.

Objective: This study investigated if young children with ASD show atypical gaze towards happy faces and its association with altered brain reward responses.

The Effects of Hearing One's Own Name on Subsequent Attention to Visual Stimuli in Autistic and Neurotypical Children: An ERP Study.

Purpose: Hearing one's own name produces unique patterns of brain activation which triggers attention and orienting responses to the caller. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) rarely orientate towards people calling their own name, but the extent to which it may facilitate processing of the following external stimuli are not yet clear.

Methods: The current study consisted of both auditory and visual stimuli.

The prevalence and effect of poor sleep amongst paramedics: a systematic review.

Background: Sleep of inadequate quality, duration or regularity has potential negative physical and mental health outcomes. The impacts of poor sleep within the paramedic occupation are not well understood.

Aims: This review aimed to determine the prevalence of insomnia, excessive daytime sleepiness and poor sleep quality amongst paramedics, and to identify any relationships between insomnia, excessive daytime sleepiness, poor sleep quality and other health-related outcomes.

GLP-1 single, dual, and triple receptor agonists for treating type 2 diabetes and obesity: a narrative review.

Unlabelled: Obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) present major global health challenges, with an increasing prevalence worldwide. Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) have emerged as a pivotal treatment option for both conditions, demonstrating efficacy in blood glucose management, weight reduction, cardiovascular disease prevention, and kidney health improvement. GLP-1, an incretin hormone, plays a crucial role in glucose metabolism and appetite regulation, influencing insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, and gastric emptying.

Neural Basis of Pain Empathy Dysregulations in Mental Disorders: A Preregistered Neuroimaging Meta-Analysis.

Background: Pain empathy represents a fundamental building block of several social functions, which have been demonstrated to be impaired across various mental disorders by accumulating evidence from case-control functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. However, it remains unclear whether the dysregulations are underpinned by robust neural alterations across mental disorders.

Methods: This study utilized coordinate-based meta-analyses to quantitatively determine robust markers of altered pain empathy across mental disorders.

Fusing multi-scale functional connectivity patterns via Multi-Branch Vision Transformer (MB-ViT) for macaque brain age prediction.

Brain age (BA) is defined as a measure of brain maturity and could help characterize both the typical brain development and neuropsychiatric disorders in mammals. Various biological phenotypes have been successfully applied to predict BA of human using chronological age (CA) as label. However, whether the BA of macaque, one of the most important animal models, can also be reliably predicted is largely unknown.

Common and separable neural alterations in adult and adolescent depression - Evidence from neuroimaging meta-analyses.

Depression is a highly prevalent and debilitating mental disorder that often begins in adolescence. However, it remains unclear whether adults and adolescents with depression exhibit common or distinct brain dysfunctions during reward processing. We aimed to identify common and separable neurofunctional alterations during receipt of rewards and brain structure in adolescents and adults with depression.

A clustering approach identifies an Autism Spectrum Disorder subtype more responsive to chronic oxytocin treatment.

Over the last decade, a number of clinical trials have reported effects of chronic treatment with intranasal oxytocin on autistic symptoms but with inconsistent findings. Autism is a heterogeneous disorder and one factor which may influence treatment outcome is whether a subtype of individuals is more sensitive to oxytocin. In a recent cross-over trial on 41 young autistic children we reported that 44% showed a reliable improvement in clinical symptoms (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, ADOS-2) after a placebo-controlled, 6-week intranasal oxytocin intervention where treatment was given every other day followed by a period of positive social interaction.

Oral Oxytocin Blurs Sex Differences in Amygdala Responses to Emotional Scenes.

Background: Sex differences are shaped both by innate biological differences and the social environment and are frequently observed in human emotional neural responses. Oral administration of oxytocin (OXT), as an alternative and noninvasive intake method, has been shown to produce sex-dependent effects on emotional face processing. However, it is unclear whether oral OXT produces similar sex-dependent effects on processing continuous emotional scenes.

Intranasal Oxytocin Improves Interoceptive Accuracy and Heartbeat-Evoked Potentials During a Cardiac Interoceptive Task.

Background: Interoception represents perception of the internal bodily state, which is closely associated with social/emotional processing and physical health in humans. Understanding the mechanism that underlies interoceptive processing, particularly its modulation, is therefore of great importance. Given the overlap between oxytocinergic pathways and interoceptive signaling substrates in both peripheral visceral organs and the brain, intranasal oxytocin administration is a promising approach for modulating interoceptive processing.

Is Chinese Medicine Facing a Potential Workforce Crisis in Australia? Demographic Changes in the Profession over the Last Decade.

As a prominent part of complementary and alternative medicine, Chinese Medicine (CM) has proved its strengths in treating a diverse range of acute and chronic medical conditions and is at present recognized in 196 countries and territories worldwide. In 2012, Australia regulated the CM profession under the National Regulation and Accreditation Scheme (NRAS) by legislation and reports quarterly demographic information about individual CM practitioners so to ensure public interest, although research examining the change of CM workforce in Australia has been scarce. This study aims to investigate the construction of the CM workforce in Australia and more importantly, evaluated its development in the last decade to capture the trajectory and trend in the present period and future potential changes.

The neurostructural consequences of glaucoma and their overlap with disorders exhibiting emotional dysregulations: A voxel-based meta-analysis and tripartite system model.

Background: Glaucoma, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder leading to irreversible blindness, is associated with heightened rates of generalized anxiety and depression. This study aims to comprehensively investigate brain morphological changes in glaucoma patients, extending beyond visual processing areas, and explores overlaps with morphological alterations observed in anxiety and depression.

Methods: A comparative meta-analysis was conducted, using case-control studies of brain structural integrity in glaucoma patients.

The right inferior frontal gyrus as pivotal node and effective regulator of the basal ganglia-thalamocortical response inhibition circuit.

Background: The involvement of specific basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits in response inhibition has been extensively mapped in animal models. However, the pivotal nodes and directed causal regulation within this inhibitory circuit in humans remains controversial.

Objective: The main aim of the present study was to determine the causal information flow and critical nodes in the basal ganglia-thalamocortical inhibitory circuits and also to examine whether these are modulated by biological factors (i.

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation enhanced emotional inhibitory control via increasing intrinsic prefrontal couplings.

Background: Inhibitory control represents a core executive function that critically facilitates adaptive behavior and survival in an ever-changing environment. Non-invasive transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has been hypothesized to improve behavioral inhibition performance, however the neurocomputational mechanism of taVNS-induced neuroenhancement remains elusive.

Method: In the current study, we investigated the efficacy of taVNS in a sham-controlled between-subject functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) experiment with an emotional face Go/No-Go paradigm in ninety healthy young adults.

What are Internal medicine residents' attitudes toward obesity as a disease, people living with obesity, and obesity treatment?

Objective: Despite the rising prevalence of people living with obesity, physicians are providing suboptimal care to these individuals, which may be a consequence of inadequate education in weight management and negative attitudes toward people living with obesity. Internal Medicine (IM) residency is an ideal setting to address physicians' attitudes toward people living with obesity. However, there is a paucity of recent literature on this topic.

Patterns of neural activity in response to threatening faces are predictive of autistic traits: modulatory effects of oxytocin receptor genotype.

Autistic individuals generally demonstrate impaired emotion recognition but it is unclear whether effects are emotion-specific or influenced by oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genotype. Here we implemented a dimensional approach using an implicit emotion recognition task together with functional MRI in a large cohort of neurotypical adult participants (N = 255, male = 131, aged 17-29 years) to establish associations between autistic traits and neural and behavioral responses to specific face emotions, together with modulatory effects of OXTR genotype. A searchlight-based multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) revealed an extensive network of frontal, basal ganglia, cingulate and limbic regions exhibiting significant predictability for autistic traits from patterns of responses to angry relative to neutral expression faces.

An obesity medicine curriculum increases the obesity care self-efficacy of internal medicine residents in the primary care setting.

Primary care physicians (PCPs) report insufficient knowledge and training gaps in obesity care. Internal Medicine (IM) residency offers an opportunity to address this educational gap for future PCPs. We designed an innovative, multicomponent curriculum on obesity medicine (OM) in the primary care setting for IM residents.

Oromucosal Administration of Oxytocin: The Development of 'Oxipops'.

The role of the hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin in influencing the brain and behavior has been the subject of widespread research over the last few decades due, most notably, to its reported involvement in promoting social cognition and motivation, reducing anxiety, and relieving pain. It is also increasingly being considered as an important therapeutic intervention in a variety of disorders with social dysfunction as a symptom. While, in recent years, studies in humans have administered oxytocin primarily via an intranasal route, since it may partly enter the brain directly this way via the olfactory and trigeminal nerves, there is increasing evidence that many of its functional effects can be peripherally mediated via increasing its concentration in the blood.

A neural signature for the subjective experience of threat anticipation under uncertainty.

Uncertainty about potential future threats and the associated anxious anticipation represents a key feature of anxiety. However, the neural systems that underlie the subjective experience of threat anticipation under uncertainty remain unclear. Combining an uncertainty-variation threat anticipation paradigm that allows precise modulation of the level of momentary anxious arousal during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with multivariate predictive modeling, we train a brain model that accurately predicts subjective anxious arousal intensity during anticipation and test it across 9 samples (total n = 572, both gender).

Mothers and fathers show different neural synchrony with their children during shared experiences.

Parent-child shared experiences has an important influence on social development in children although contributions of mothers and fathers may differ. Neural synchronicity occurs between mothers and fathers and their children during social interactions but it is unclear whether they differ in this respect. We used data from simultaneous fNIRS hyperscanning in mothers (n = 33) and fathers (n = 29) and their children (3-4 years) to determine different patterns and strengths of neural synchronization in the frontal cortex during co-viewing of videos or free-play.