Exploring and comparing the relationship between maternal anxiety and children's anxiety during admission, hospitalization, and discharge in pediatric wards of Iranian hospitals.

Background: Parental anxiety levels increase during their child's hospitalization. Consequently, anxiety can disrupt parental functioning as a caregiver and potentially transfer distress to the child. This study seeks to explore how maternal anxiety affects the anxiety levels of hospitalized children across three key stages: admission, in-hospital stay, and discharge.

Central visual pathways affected by degenerative retinal disease before and after gene therapy.

Genetic diseases affecting the retina can result in partial or complete loss of visual function. Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA) is a rare blinding disease, usually inherited in an autosomally recessive manner, with no cure. Retinal gene therapy has been shown to improve vision in LCA patients caused by mutations in the RPE65 gene (LCA2).

Dynamic structural remodeling of the human visual system prompted by bilateral retinal gene therapy.

The impact of changes in visual input on neuronal circuitry is complex and much of our knowledge on human brain plasticity of the visual systems comes from animal studies. Reinstating vision in a group of patients with low vision through retinal gene therapy creates a unique opportunity to dynamically study the underlying process responsible for brain plasticity. Historically, increases in the axonal myelination of the visual pathway has been the biomarker for brain plasticity.

Motion-selective areas V5/MT and MST appear resistant to deterioration in choroideremia.

Choroideremia (CHM) is an X-linked recessive form of hereditary retinal degeneration, which preserves only small islands of central retinal tissue. Previously, we demonstrated the relationship between central vision and structure and population receptive fields (pRF) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in untreated CHM subjects. Here, we replicate and extend this work, providing a more in-depth analysis of the visual responses in a cohort of CHM subjects who participated in a retinal gene therapy clinical trial.

Neuroplasticity of the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus in Response to Retinal Gene Therapy in a Group of Patients with Mutations.

Introduction: Previous works on experience-dependent brain plasticity have been limited to the cortical structures, overlooking subcortical visual structures such as the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Animal studies have shown substantial experience dependent plasticity and using fMRI, human studies have demonstrated similar properties in patients with cataract surgery. However, in neither animal nor human studies LGN has not been directly assessed, mainly due to its small size, tissue heterogeneity, low contrast/noise ratio, and low spatial resolution.