Lower fasting muscle mitochondrial activity relates to hepatic steatosis in humans.

Objective: Muscle insulin resistance has been implicated in the development of steatosis and dyslipidemia by changing the partitioning of postprandial substrate fluxes. Also, insulin resistance may be due to reduced mitochondrial function. We examined the association between mitochondrial activity, insulin sensitivity, and steatosis in a larger human population.

Discontinuous patterns of brain activation in the psychotherapy process of obsessive-compulsive disorder: converging results from repeated FMRI and daily self-reports.

This study investigates neuronal activation patterns during the psychotherapeutic process, assuming that change dynamics undergo critical instabilities and discontinuous transitions. An internet-based system was used to collect daily self-assessments during inpatient therapies. A dynamic complexity measure was applied to the resulting time series.

Usefulness of losartan on the size of the ascending aorta in an unselected cohort of children, adolescents, and young adults with Marfan syndrome.

Since 2008, when angiotensin II type I receptor blockade with losartan was introduced in the prevention of cardiovascular manifestation of Marfan syndrome (MFS), a specific treatment to address the cardiovascular lesions became available. The present study aimed to compare the response of such in an unselected cohort of patients with genotyped MFS. At a tertiary university children's hospital, 20 pediatric and adolescent patients aged 1.

Impaired hippocampal rate coding after lesions of the lateral entorhinal cortex.

In the hippocampus, spatial and non-spatial parameters may be represented by a dual coding scheme, in which coordinates in space are expressed by the collective firing locations of place cells and the diversity of experience at these locations is encoded by orthogonal variations in firing rates. Although the spatial signal may reflect input from medial entorhinal cortex, the sources of the variations in firing rate have not been identified. We found that rate variations in rat CA3 place cells depended on inputs from the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC).

Effects of individual glucose levels on the neuronal correlates of emotions.

This study aimed to directly assess the effect of changes in blood glucose levels on the psychological processing of emotionally charged material. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to evaluate the effect of blood glucose levels on three categories of visually presented emotional stimuli. Seventeen healthy young subjects participated in this study (eight females; nine males; body weight, 69.

Beyond Noise: Using Temporal ICA to Extract Meaningful Information from High-Frequency fMRI Signal Fluctuations during Rest.

Analysis of resting-state networks using fMRI usually ignores high-frequency fluctuations in the BOLD signal - be it because of low TR prohibiting the analysis of fluctuations with frequencies higher than 0.25 Hz (for a typical TR of 2 s), or because of the application of a bandpass filter (commonly restricting the signal to frequencies lower than 0.1 Hz).

An update on male breast cancer and future directions for research and treatment.

Male breast cancer is a rare disease for which treatment has been based on the evidence available from female breast cancer. The new genomic tools can better characterize the biology of breast cancer. It is hoping that these will help to clarify possible differences of breast cancer behaviour in male patients, which will have a major impact on treatment strategies and on the conduct of clinical trials in this setting.

Traces of experience in the lateral entorhinal cortex.

A growing body of evidence suggests that memories are stored in the hippocampus by integrating spatial information from specialized cell types in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) with nonspatial information from cells in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC). LEC neurons show little spatial modulation when rats run in empty open-field environments but fire in the vicinity of discrete objects, suggesting that they provide information about the specific content of the spatial environment. It is unclear, however, whether firing at objects is elicited purely by stimulus properties, in a sensory-like manner, or whether any higher-order property, such as the history of experience, is also relevant.

MR/PET or PET/MRI: does it matter?

After the very successful clinical introduction of combined PET/CT imaging a decade ago, a hardware combination of PET and MR is following suit. Today, three different approaches towards integrated PET/MR have been proposed: (1) a triple-modality system with a 3T MRI and a time-of-flight PET/CT installed in adjacent rooms, (2) a tandem system with a 3T MRI and a time-of-flight PET/CT in a co-planar installation with a joint patient handling system, and (3) a fully-integrated system with a whole-body PET system mounted inside a 3T MRI system. This special issue of MAGMA brings together contributions from key experts in the field of PET/MR, PET/CT and CT.

Memory, navigation and theta rhythm in the hippocampal-entorhinal system.

Theories on the functions of the hippocampal system are based largely on two fundamental discoveries: the amnestic consequences of removing the hippocampus and associated structures in the famous patient H.M. and the observation that spiking activity of hippocampal neurons is associated with the spatial position of the rat.

Grid cells require excitatory drive from the hippocampus.

To determine how hippocampal backprojections influence spatially periodic firing in grid cells, we recorded neural activity in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) of rats after temporary inactivation of the hippocampus. We report two major changes in entorhinal grid cells. First, hippocampal inactivation gradually and selectively extinguished the grid pattern.

RESCALE: Voxel-specific task-fMRI scaling using resting state fluctuation amplitude.

The BOLD signal measured in fMRI studies depends not only on neuronal activity, but also on other parameters like tissue vascularization, which may vary between subjects and between brain regions. A correction for variance from vascularization effects can thus lead to improved group statistics by reducing inter-subject variability. The fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) as determined in a resting-state scan has been shown to be dependent on vascularization.

All layers of medial entorhinal cortex receive presubicular and parasubicular inputs.

The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), presubiculum (PrS), and parasubiculum (PaS) are interconnected components of the hippocampal-parahippocampal spatial-representation system. Principal cells in all layers of MEC show signs of directional tuning, overt in head direction cells present in all layers except for layer II, and covert in grid cells, which are the major spatially modulated cell type in layer II. Directional information likely originates in the head direction-vestibular system and PrS and PaS are thought to provide this information to MEC.

The entorhinal grid map is discretized.

The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) is part of the brain's circuit for dynamic representation of self-location. The metric of this representation is provided by grid cells, cells with spatial firing fields that tile environments in a periodic hexagonal pattern. Limited anatomical sampling has obscured whether the grid system operates as a unified system or a conglomerate of independent modules.

Increased neural habituation in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex in social anxiety disorder revealed by FMRI.

A characterizing symptom of social anxiety disorder (SAD) is increased emotional reactivity towards potential social threat in combination with impaired emotion and stress regulation. While several neuroimaging studies have linked SAD with hyperreactivity in limbic brain regions when exposed to emotional faces, little is known about habituation in both the amygdala and neocortical regulation areas. 15 untreated SAD patients and 15 age- and gender-matched healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during repeated blocks of facial emotion ([Formula: see text]) and object discrimination tasks ([Formula: see text]).

Effect of sitagliptin on post-prandial glucagon and GLP-1 levels in patients with type 1 diabetes: investigator-initiated, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial.

Objective: Peripheral insulin resistance in type 1 diabetes may be related to a paradoxical postprandial glucagon increase. This study evaluated the effects of sitagliptin (dipeptidyl peptidase-IV [DPP-IV] inhibitor, approved for patients with type 2 diabetes), in adults with type 1 diabetes to improve glycemic control through decreasing postprandial glucagon.

Methods: This investigator-initiated, double-blind, randomized-parallel 20-week study enrolled 141 subjects.

Automatic model-based analysis of skeletal muscle BOLD-MRI in reactive hyperemia.

Purpose: To propose a quantitative model for a reliable and operator independent estimation of parameters describing blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) MRI time course in calf muscles during reactive hyperemia.

Materials And Methods: Echo planar imaging-based BOLD-MRI of the human calf were acquired during and after cuff-induced ischemia of the leg. Regions of interest were drawn in soleus, gastrocnemius and tibialis anterior muscles.

Coexistence of KCNV2 associated cone dystrophy with supernormal rod electroretinogram and MFRP related oculopathy in a Turkish family.

Background And Aim: To describe the clinical and genetic characteristics of a mother and her son presenting with two distinct and rare forms of retinal degeneration.

Methods: Investigations in both patients comprised spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), fundus autofluorescence imaging, non-contact biometry, ultrasonography, electroretinography (ERG) and analysis of the mutational status of the KCNV2 and MFRP genes in genomic DNA.

Results: The clinical course and typical ERG pattern indicated a 'cone dystrophy with supernormal rod electroretinogram' in the proband, and SD-OCT demonstrated a subfoveal optical gap with loss of the inner segment/outer segment junction line.

Fully exploratory network independent component analysis of the 1000 functional connectomes database.

The 1000 Functional Connectomes Project is a collection of resting-state fMRI datasets from more than 1000 subjects acquired in more than 30 independent studies from around the globe. This large, heterogeneous sample of resting-state data offers the unique opportunity to study the consistencies of resting-state networks at both subject and study level. In extension to the seminal paper by Biswal et al.

Accelerated partial breast irradiation: the need for well-defined patient selection criteria, improved volume definitions, close follow-up and discussion of salvage treatment.

Breast-conserving therapy, including whole breast irradiation, has become a well-established alternative to mastectomy in early-stage breast cancer patients, with similar survival rates and better cosmetic outcome. However, many women are still treated with mastectomy, due to logistical issues related to the long course of radiotherapy (RT). To reduce mastectomy rates and/or omission of RT after breast-conserving surgery, shorter, hypofractionated RT treatments have been introduced.

Dendritic cells tolerized with adenosine A₂AR agonist attenuate acute kidney injury.

DC-mediated NKT cell activation is critical in initiating the immune response following kidney ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI), which mimics human acute kidney injury (AKI). Adenosine is an important antiinflammatory molecule in tissue inflammation, and adenosine 2A receptor (A₂AR) agonists protect kidneys from IRI through their actions on leukocytes. In this study, we showed that mice with A₂AR-deficient DCs are more susceptible to kidney IRI and are not protected from injury by A₂AR agonists.