Publications by authors named "Peijuan Luo"
Significance: Despite the availability of various anti-seizure medications, nearly 1/3 of epilepsy patients experience drug-resistant seizures. These patients are left with invasive surgical options that do not guarantee seizure remission. The development of novel treatment options depends on elucidating the complex biology of seizures and brain networks.
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- Accurate interpretation of wide-field fluorescent imaging (WFFI) data requires distinguishing between neural and blood flow signals, which is essential for understanding brain activity.
- The traditional method, based on the Beer-Lambert law, struggles with estimating brain blood volume changes due to interference from non-neural signals, leading to inaccuracies.
- This study presents a new linear regression approach that corrects these biases, improving the accuracy of measurements related to blood volume and neural activity, and has been validated across various datasets.
Article Synopsis
- The study explores how hemodynamic responses to interictal spikes can aid in presurgical epilepsy evaluations and emphasizes the need to understand these responses accurately.* -
- Using awake and isoflurane-anesthetized mice, researchers measured the impact of anesthesia on neuronal calcium signals and hemodynamic responses, finding that anesthesia alters LFP amplitude but minimally affects calcium signals.* -
- The findings suggest that increases in cerebral blood volume during interictal spikes serve as a reliable mapping signal for excitatory neuronal activity, independent of anesthesia effects on thalamocortical function.*
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how focal epilepsy involves network dynamics, where epileptiform activity spreads through interconnected brain regions, particularly focusing on interictal spikes (IISs) and their role in network recruitment.
- Using animal models, the researchers injected bicuculline into the S1 barrel cortex and monitored neural activity in various connected nodes, revealing that IISs activated excitatory and inhibitory cells across these regions.
- The findings suggest that IISs do not spread contiguously but rather exploit neural pathways, demonstrating that the balance between excitatory and inhibitory signals is crucial for understanding how these networks function in epilepsy.
Background: Identifying the predictors for seizure outcome in autoimmune encephalitis (AE) and investigating how to prevent persistent seizures would have major clinical benefits effectively. Thus, we aimed to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine seizure outcome-related factors in AE patients.
Methods: PubMed and EMBASE were systematically searched from inception to 10 June 2022 for studies investigating seizure outcome-related factors in AE.
Article Synopsis
- Identifying the precise area of seizure activity in the brain is difficult when there are no visible anatomical changes.
- This study compared brain activity during seizures in awake mice versus isoflurane-anesthetized mice using advanced imaging techniques to track changes in neuronal and blood flow signals.
- Results showed that awake mice had more concentrated seizure activity with stronger blood volume signals, suggesting that techniques based on cerebral blood volume (CBV) are more effective than those based on blood oxygen levels for mapping seizures.
Article Synopsis
- Inhalational anesthetics like isoflurane induce burst suppression (BS) in the brain, which was previously thought to be a globally synchronous activity but is actually locally asynchronous.
- Researchers used calcium imaging in rats to show that neural activity during BS emerges from localized, shifting areas rather than occurring simultaneously across the brain.
- The study revealed that while bursts propagate quickly and appear synchronized, true synchronization is absent, and the thalamus plays a key role in initiating these bursts.
Tumor necrosis factor-α in Guillain-Barré syndrome, friend or foe?
Expert Opin Ther Targets
January 2017
Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an immune-mediated disorder in the peripheral nervous system (PNS), and experimental autoimmune neuritis (EAN) serves as an animal model of GBS. TNF-α plays an important role in the pathogenesis of GBS and is a potential therapeutic target of GBS. Areas covered: 'TNF-α' and 'Guillain-Barré syndrome' were the keywords used to search for related publications on Pubmed.
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