Publications by authors named "Sobel N"

Background: Breathing patterns may inform on health. We note that the sites of earliest brain damage in Parkinson's disease (PD) house the neural pace-makers of respiration. We therefore hypothesized that ongoing long-term temporal dynamics of respiration may be altered in PD.

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  • Olfaction may seem limited in influencing human behavior, but losing the sense of smell (anosmia) can lead to serious negative effects, including a shorter lifespan.
  • The study investigates how anosmia affects nasal airflow patterns using a wearable device that tracks breathing over 24 hours in individuals with and without anosmia.
  • Findings show that airflow patterns differ significantly in those with anosmia, which could explain some health and emotional issues linked to the condition, suggesting that altered breathing may be a bigger factor than just the inability to perceive smells.
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  • Rotator cuff calcific tendinopathy (RCCT) is a common condition causing shoulder pain due to calcium buildup on rotator cuff tendons.
  • Initial treatments for RCCT usually involve anti-inflammatory medications and physical therapy, but some patients may require more advanced options if symptoms persist.
  • A case study highlighted a 36-year-old woman who experienced significant relief and full recovery from RCCT symptoms using ultrasound-guided steroid injections and physical therapy, suggesting this method can be effective for difficult cases.
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An ongoing debate exists regarding the feasibility of placing self-expanding metallic stents (SEMS) within 5 cm of the anal verge. Traditionally, SEMS have been considered contraindicated for patients with a malignant rectal obstruction within this region due to potential impact on the anorectal ring or anal canal, which can cause incontinence, proctalgia, and tenesmus. However, in the case of a 63-year-old female who presented with distention, abdominal pain, and diminishing stool output, the rectal exam identified a bulky fixed mass.

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Terrestrial mammals identify conspecifics by body odor. Dogs can also identify humans by body odor, and in some instances, humans can identify other humans by body odor as well. Despite the potential for a powerful biometric tool, smell has not been systematically used for this purpose.

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Rodent tears contain social chemosignals with diverse effects, including blocking male aggression. Human tears also contain a chemosignal that lowers male testosterone, but its behavioral significance was unclear. Because reduced testosterone is associated with reduced aggression, we tested the hypothesis that human tears act like rodent tears to block male aggression.

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Background: Disorders of consciousness (DoC) are severe neurological conditions in which consciousness is impaired to various degrees. They are caused by injury or malfunction of neural systems regulating arousal and awareness. Over the last decades, major efforts in improving and individualizing diagnostic and prognostic accuracy for patients affected by DoC have been made, mainly focusing on introducing multimodal assessments to complement behavioral examination.

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Nonhuman terrestrial mammals sniff themselves and each other to decide who is friend or foe. Humans also sniff themselves and each other, but the function of this is unknown. Because humans seek friends who are similar to themselves, we hypothesized that humans may smell themselves and others to subconsciously estimate body odor similarity, which, in turn, may promote friendship.

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Background: Key to curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic are wide-scale screening strategies. An ideal screen is one that would not rely on transporting, distributing, and collecting physical specimens. Given the olfactory impairment associated with COVID-19, we developed a perceptual measure of olfaction that relies on smelling household odorants and rating them online.

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In terrestrial mammals, body volatiles can effectively trigger or block conspecific aggression. Here, we tested whether hexadecanal (HEX), a human body volatile implicated as a mammalian-wide social chemosignal, affects human aggression. Using validated behavioral paradigms, we observed a marked dissociation: Sniffing HEX blocked aggression in men but triggered aggression in women.

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Etched ion-track polycarbonate membranes with conical nanochannels of aspect ratios of ~3000 are coated with AlO, TiO, and SiO thin films of thicknesses between 10 and 20 nm by atomic layer deposition (ALD). By combining ion-track technology and ALD, the fabrication of two kinds of functional structures with customized surfaces is presented: (i) arrays of free-standing conical nanotubes with controlled geometry and wall thickness, interesting for, e.g.

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Rapid diagnosis is key to curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic. One path to such rapid diagnosis may rely on identifying volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by the infected body, or in other words, identifying the smell of the infection. Consistent with this rationale, dogs can use their nose to identify Covid-19 patients.

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become the leading method for measuring the human brain response to sensory stimuli. However, olfaction fMRI lags behind vision and audition fMRI for 2 primary reasons: First, the olfactory brain areas are particularly susceptible to imaging artifacts, and second, the olfactory stimulus is particularly difficult to control in the fMRI environment. A component of the latter is related to the odorant delivery human-machine interface, namely the point where odorants exit the dispensing apparatus to reach at the nose.

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Wavelength is a physical measure of light, and the intricate understanding of its link to perceived colour enables the creation of perceptual entities such as metamers-non-overlapping spectral compositions that generate identical colour percepts. By contrast, scientists have been unable to develop a physical measure linked to perceived smell, even one that merely reflects the extent of perceptual similarity between odorants. Here, to generate such a measure, we collected perceptual similarity estimates of 49,788 pairwise odorants from 199 participants who smelled 242 different multicomponent odorants and used these data to refine a predictive model that links odorant structure to odorant perception.

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Mammalian olfaction and reproduction are tightly linked, a link less explored in humans. Here, we asked whether human unexplained repeated pregnancy loss (uRPL) is associated with altered olfaction, and particularly altered olfactory responses to body-odor. We found that whereas most women with uRPL could identify the body-odor of their spouse, most control women could not.

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Introduction: Women's olfactory perception varies across the menstrual cycle. The influence of oral contraceptives on this variability remains unclear.

Methods: To further estimate this, we assessed discrimination performance for both body odors and ordinary odorants in 36 women, 18 naturally ovulating, and 18 using oral contraceptives.

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After severe brain injury, it can be difficult to determine the state of consciousness of a patient, to determine whether the patient is unresponsive or perhaps minimally conscious, and to predict whether they will recover. These diagnoses and prognoses are crucial, as they determine therapeutic strategies such as pain management, and can underlie end-of-life decisions. Nevertheless, there is an error rate of up to 40% in determining the state of consciousness in patients with brain injuries.

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have implemented various strategies to reduce and slow the spread of the disease in the general population. For countries that have implemented restrictions on its population in a step-wise manner, monitoring of COVID-19 prevalence is of importance to guide decision on when to impose new, or when to abolish old, restrictions. We are here determining whether measures of odor intensity in a large sample can serve as one such measure.

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All primates, including humans, engage in self-face-touching at very high frequency. The functional purpose or antecedents of this behaviour remain unclear. In this , we put forth the hypothesis that self-face-touching subserves self-smelling.

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Memory consolidation can be promoted via targeted memory reactivation (TMR) that re-presents training cues or context during sleep. Whether TMR acts locally or globally on cortical sleep oscillations remains unknown. Here, we exploit the unique functional neuroanatomy of olfaction with its ipsilateral stimulus processing to perform local TMR in one brain hemisphere.

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The olfactory bulbs (OBs) are the first site of odor representation in the mammalian brain, and their unique ultrastructure is considered a necessary substrate for spatiotemporal coding of smell. Given this, we were struck by the serendipitous observation at MRI of two otherwise healthy young left-handed women, yet with no apparent OBs. Standardized tests revealed normal odor awareness, detection, discrimination, identification, and representation.

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Olfactory stimulus acquisition is perfectly synchronized with inhalation, which tunes neuronal ensembles for incoming information. Because olfaction is an ancient sensory system that provided a template for brain evolution, we hypothesized that this link persisted, and therefore nasal inhalations may also tune the brain for acquisition of non-olfactory information. To test this, we measured nasal airflow and electroencephalography during various non-olfactory cognitive tasks.

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A common goal in olfaction research is modeling the link between odorant structure and odor perception. Such modeling efforts require large data sets on olfactory perception, yet only a few of these are publicly and freely available. Given that individual odor perception may be informative on personal makeup and interpersonal relationships, we hypothesized that people would gladly provide olfactory perceptual estimates in the context of an odor-based social network.

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