Publications by authors named "Lorena Vega-Zelaya"

Article Synopsis
  • A pilot study analyzed sleep and wake stages in 19 healthy participants using advanced numerical methods and a specific EEG montage to evaluate brain activity across different lobes.
  • Power spectra were calculated to assess brain wave activities, revealing significant differences between sexes during particular sleep stages, although these differences disappeared when isolating specific brain areas.
  • The analysis highlighted distinct features in brain wave patterns during various sleep stages, particularly focusing on K-complexes and sleep spindles, suggesting that quantitative EEG (qEEG) is a reliable tool for studying sleep patterns in both healthy and clinical populations.
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Science and philosophy have tried to understand the origin of emotions for centuries. However, only in the last 150 years have we started to try to understand them in a neuroscientific scope. Emotions include physiological changes involving different systems, such as the endocrine or the musculoskeletal, but they also cause a conscious experience of those changes that are embedded in memory.

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Background: Tarsal tunnel syndrome (TTS) involves entrapment of the tibial nerve at the medial ankle beneath the flexor retinaculum and its branches, the medial and lateral plantar nerves, as they course through the porta pedis formed by the deep fascia of the abductor hallucis muscle. TTS is likely underdiagnosed, because diagnosis is based on clinical evaluation and history of present illness. The ultrasound-guided lidocaine infiltration test (USLIT) is a simple approach that may aid in the diagnosis of TTS and predict the response to neurolysis of the tibial nerve and its branches.

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Background: Music is considered a valuable method for stimulating patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) by enhancing their awareness and arousal. Although biographical music and auditory relative stimulation has been shown, responses to other types of music has not yet been addressed. The purpose of this study was to assess the brain responses in critically ill patients under sedo-analgesia to music that is highly different in features.

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We used numerical methods to define the normative structure of resting-state EEG (rsEEG) in a pilot study of 37 healthy subjects (10-74 years old), using a double-banana bipolar montage. Artifact-free 120-200 s epoch lengths were visually identified and divided into 1 s windows with a 10% overlap. Differential channels were grouped by frontal, parieto-occipital, and temporal lobes.

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Background: Cortico-cortical evoked potentials (CCEPs) have been used to map the frontal (FLA) and parietal (PLA) cortical regions related to language function. However, they have usually been employed as a complementary method during sleep-awake surgery.

Methods: Five male and two female patients received surgery for tumors located near language areas.

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Background: We obtained microelectrode recordings from four patients with intractable aggressivity who underwent surgery at posteromedial hypothalamus under general anaesthesia. We described two general types of extracellular action potentials (EAPs): typical/canonical and atypical.

Methods: We analysed 337 units and 67 traces, which were characterized by the mean action potential (mAP).

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Deep brain stimulation (DBS) requires a precise localization, which is especially difficult at the hypothalamus, because it is usually performed in anesthetized patients. We aimed to characterize the neurophysiological properties posteromedial hypothalamus (PMH), identified by the best neurophysiological response to electrical stimulation. We obtained microelectrode recordings from four patients with intractable aggressivity operated under general anesthesia.

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Background: Tarsal tunnel syndrome (TTS) is one of the most common entrapment syndromes. Although diagnosis is supported by imaging tests, it has so far been based on clinical findings. Neurophysiological tests are not effective for providing an accurate diagnosis.

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Background And Importance: Deep brain stimulation of the posteromedial hypothalamus (PMH DBS) appears to be an effective treatment for drug-resistant aggressiveness. Weaver syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder in which patients develop some degree of intellectual disability and rarely severe behavioral alterations that may benefit from this procedure.

Clinical Presentation: We present the case of a 26-yr-old man diagnosed with WS presenting with uncontrollable self and heteroaggressiveness and disruptive behavior refractory to pharmacological treatment and under severe physical and mechanical restraining measures.

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Deep brain stimulation (DBS), specifically thalamic DBS, has achieved promising results to reduce seizure severity and frequency in pharmacoresistant epilepsies, thereby establishing it for clinical use. The mechanisms of action are, however, still unknown. We evidenced the brain networks directly modulated by centromedian (CM) nucleus-DBS and responsible for clinical outcomes in a cohort of patients uniquely diagnosed with generalized pharmacoresistant epilepsy.

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Our objective was to describe the electrophysiological properties of the extracellular action potential (AP) picked up through microelectrode recordings (MERs). Five patients were operated under general anesthesia for centromedian deep brain stimulation (DBS). APs from the same cell were pooled to obtain a mean AP (mAP).

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Microelectrode recording (MER) in deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery has long been a recognized and efficient method for defining a target. However, in recent decades, imaging techniques, including DBS surgery, have experienced significant growth. There is convincing evidence that imaging-guided surgery can be helpful for targeting anatomically well-defined nuclei (e.

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Besides giving rise to oligodendrocytes (the only myelin-forming cell in the Central Nervous System (CNS) in physiological conditions), Oligodendrocyte Precursor Cells (OPCs) are responsible for spontaneous remyelination after a demyelinating lesion. They are present along the mouse and human CNS, both during development and in adulthood, yet how OPC physiological behavior is modified throughout life is not fully understood. The activity of adult human OPCs is still particularly unexplored.

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We used quantified electroencephalography (qEEG) to define the features of encephalopathy in patients released from the intensive care unit after severe illness from COVID-19. Artifact-free 120-300 s epoch lengths were visually identified and divided into 1 s windows with 10% overlap. Differential channels were grouped by frontal, parieto-occipital, and temporal lobes.

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Epileptic seizures (ES) are frequent in critically ill patients and their detection and treatment are mandatory. However, sometimes it is quite difficult to discriminate between ES and non-epileptic bursts of periodic activity (BPA). Our aim was to characterize ES and BPA by means of quantified electroencephalography (qEEG).

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Objective: Initial studies applying deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the posteromedial hypothalamus (PMH) to patients with pathological aggressiveness have yielded encouraging results. However, the anatomical structures involved in its therapeutic effect have not been precisely identified. The authors' objective was to describe the long-term outcome in their 7-patient series, and the tractography analysis of the volumes of tissue activated in 2 of the responders.

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Deep brain stimulation (DBS) requires precise localization, which is especially difficult at the thalamus, and even more difficult in anesthetized patients. We aimed to characterize the neurophysiological properties of the ventral intermediate (V.im), ventral caudal (V.

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Objective: During deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery, we analysed somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs) using microelectrode recordings (MERs) in patients under general anaesthesia.

Methods: We obtained MERs from 5 patients with refractory epilepsy. Off-line analysis isolated local field potentials (LFPs, 2-200 Hz) and high frequency components (HFCs, 0.

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Background: Diagnostic methods of the epileptogenic area continue to be a challenge in epilepsy surgery research. We hypothesized that temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) will result in white matter changes that can be detected using diffusion tensor imaging. Measurement of white matter diffusivity will therefore be useful for presurgical assessment.

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Objective: Sedation of neurocritically ill patients is one of the most challenging situation in ICUs. Quantitative knowledge on the sedation effect on brain activity in that complex scenario could help to uncover new markers for sedation assessment. Hence, we aim to evaluate the existence of changes of diverse EEG-derived measures in deeply-sedated (RASS-Richmond agitation-sedation scale  -4 and  -5) neurocritically ill patients, and also whether sedation doses are related with those eventual changes.

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Objective: To explore and assess the relationship between electroencephalography (EEG) activity and intracranial pressure (ICP) in patients suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) during their stay in an intensive care unit.

Approach: We performed an observational prospective cohort study of adult patients suffering from TBI or SAH. Continuous EEG-ECG was performed during ICP monitoring.

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Approximately 30% of epilepsy patients are refractory to antiepileptic drugs. In these cases, surgery is the only alternative to eliminate/control seizures. However, a significant minority of patients continues to exhibit post-operative seizures, even in those cases in which the suspected source of seizures has been correctly localized and resected.

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