Condensation: A Retrospective Cohort Study to Investigate the Association Between Maternal Pre-pregnancy Obesity and Childhood Respiratory Disease.

Objective: We sought to explore whether maternal pre-pregnancy obesity is an independent risk factor for offspring respiratory morbidity during childhood.

Methods: A population-based retrospective cohort analysis comparing childhood respiratory morbidity incidence in offspring to mothers with pre-pregnancy obesity (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m) and those who had lower BMI was conducted. Respiratory diagnoses were pre-defined based on ICD-9 codes.

Inter-participant consistency of language-processing networks during abstract thoughts.

Human brain imaging typically employs structured and controlled tasks to avoid variable and inconsistent activation patterns. Here we expand this assumption by showing that an extremely open-ended, high-level cognitive task of thinking about an abstract content, loosely defined as "abstract thinking" - leads to highly consistent activation maps. Specifically, we show that activation maps generated during such cognitive process were precisely located relative to borders of well-known networks such as internal speech, visual and motor imagery.

The Noisy Brain: Power of Resting-State Fluctuations Predicts Individual Recognition Performance.

The unique profile of strong and weak cognitive traits characterizing each individual is of a fundamental significance, yet their neurophysiological underpinnings remain elusive. Here, we present intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) measurements in humans pointing to resting-state cortical "noise" as a possible neurophysiological trait that limits visual recognition capacity. We show that amplitudes of slow (<1 Hz) spontaneous fluctuations in high-frequency power measured during rest were predictive of the patients' performance in a visual recognition 1-back task (26 patients, total of 1,389 bipolar contacts pairs).

The retinol-binding protein receptor STRA6 regulates diurnal insulin responses.

It has long been appreciated that insulin action is closely tied to circadian rhythms. However, the mechanisms that dictate diurnal insulin sensitivity in metabolic tissues are not well understood. Retinol-binding protein 4 (RBP4) has been implicated as a driver of insulin resistance in rodents and humans, and it has become an attractive drug target in type II diabetes.