Brief and Diverse Excitotoxic Insults Increase the Neuronal Nuclear Membrane Permeability in the Neonatal Brain, Resulting in Neuronal Dysfunction and Cell Death.

Neuronal cytotoxic edema is implicated in neuronal injury and death, yet mitigating brain edema with osmotic and surgical interventions yields poor clinical outcomes. Importantly, neuronal swelling and its downstream consequences during early brain development remain poorly investigated, and new treatment approaches are needed. We explored Ca-dependent downstream effects after neuronal cytotoxic edema caused by diverse injuries in mice of both sexes using multiphoton Ca imaging in vivo [Postnatal Day (P)12-17] and in acute brain slices (P8-12).

Role of NKCC1 and KCC2 during hypoxia-induced neuronal swelling in the neonatal neocortex.

Neonatal hypoxia causes cytotoxic neuronal swelling by the entry of ions and water. Multiple water pathways have been implicated in neurons because these cells lack water channels, and their membrane has a low water permeability. NKCC1 and KCC2 are cation-chloride cotransporters (CCCs) involved in water movement in various cell types.

Lacosamide decreases neonatal seizures without increasing apoptosis.

Objective: Many seizing neonates fail to respond to first-line anticonvulsant medications. Phenobarbital, an allosteric modulator of γ-aminobutyric acid type A (GABA ) receptors, has low efficacy in treating neonatal seizures and causes neuronal apoptosis. Nonetheless, it is one of the most used anticonvulsants in this age group.

The opioid antagonist naltrexone decreases seizure-like activity in genetic and chemically induced epilepsy models.

Objective: A significant number of epileptic patients fail to respond to available anticonvulsive medications. To find new anticonvulsive medications, we evaluated FDA-approved drugs not known to be anticonvulsants. Using zebrafish larvae as an initial model system, we found that the opioid antagonist naltrexone exhibited an anticonvulsant effect.

ANMAF: an automated neuronal morphology analysis framework using convolutional neural networks.

Measurement of neuronal size is challenging due to their complex histology. Current practice includes manual or pseudo-manual measurement of somatic areas, which is labor-intensive and prone to human biases and intra-/inter-observer variances. We developed a novel high-throughput neuronal morphology analysis framework (ANMAF), using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to automatically contour the somatic area of fluorescent neurons in acute brain slices.