Liver Disease Complicating Familial Mediterranean Fever: A Study on 66 Patients Out of 533 Adult From the JIR Cohort.

Background: Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) is the most common monogenic autoinflammatory disease, associated with MEFV mutations. FMF patients can experience liver involvement, potentially leading to cirrhosis.

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate liver involvement in FMF patients at a French tertiary centre for adult FMF.

Altered corollary discharge in the auditory cortex could reflect louder inner voice experience in patients with verbal hallucinations, a pilot fMRI study.

Introduction: Wide range of evidence associates auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) with frontotemporal corollary discharge deficit. AVH likely reflect altered experiences of the inner voice and are phenomenologically diverse. The aspects of hallucinations (and related inner voice experiences) that could be explained by this deficit remain unclear.

Ketamine promotes adaption-induced orientation plasticity and vigorous network changes.

Adult primary visual cortex features well demonstrated orientation selectivities. However, the imposition of a non-preferred stimulus for many minutes (adaptation) or the application of an antidepressant drug, such as ketamine, shifts the peak of the tuning curve, assigning a novel selectivity to a neuron. The effect of ketamine on V1 neural circuitry is not yet ascertained.

Keeping the inner voice inside the head, a pilot fMRI study.

Introduction: The inner voice is experienced during thinking in words (inner speech) and silent reading and evokes brain activity that is highly similar to that associated with external voices. Yet while the inner voice is experienced in internal space (inside the head), external voices (one's own and those of others) are experienced in external space. In this paper, we investigate the neural basis of this differential spatial localization.

The Self, Agency and Spatial Externalizations of Inner Verbal Thoughts, and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations.

Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVH) are experienced as the "voices" of others (O-AVH) or self (S-AVH) in internal space/inside the head (IS-AVH) or external space (ES-AVH), and are considered to result from agency and spatial externalizations of inner speech. Both types of externalizations are conflated, and the relationship between these externalizations and AVH experiences is unclear. In this paper, I investigate the relationship between cognitive agency and spatial externalizations and between these externalizations and the types of AVH experience.

Alcohol withdrawal hallucinations in the general population, an epidemiological study.

Hallucinations are sometimes encountered in the course of alcohol withdrawal; however, both the factors predisposing to alcohol withdrawal hallucinations (AWH) and the implications of AWH with respect to the mechanisms of hallucinations remain unclear. To clarify these issues, we used data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) to investigate the demographic correlates, alcohol-use clinical patterns, and psychiatric comorbidities in two groups: drinkers with and without a history of AWH. We estimated the odds ratios for studied factors and used logistic regression analyses to compare the two groups.

Abnormal Neural Oscillations in Schizophrenia Assessed by Spectral Power Ratio of MEG During Word Processing.

This study investigated spectral power of neural oscillations associated with word processing in schizophrenia. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data were acquired from 12 schizophrenia patients and 10 healthy controls during a visual word processing task. Two spectral power ratio (SPR) feature sets: the band power ratio (BPR) and the window power ratio (WPR) were extracted from MEG data in five frequency bands, four time windows of word processing, and at locations covering whole head.

Characteristics of Adult T-Cell Leukemia/Lymphoma Patients with Long Survival: Prognostic Significance of Skin Lesions and Possible Beneficial Role of Valproic Acid.

We describe the clinical and biological features of ten patients with a survival superior to ten years (long survival), out of 175 patients diagnosed with Adult T-cell Leukemia/Lymphoma (ATL) in Martinique (1983-2013). There were 5 lymphoma and 5 chronic subtypes. Five of them (3 chronic, 2 lymphoma) had been treated with valproic acid (VA) for neurological disorders developed before or after ATL diagnosis, suggesting a beneficial role for VA as a histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDI) in ATL treatment.

Better than mermaids and stray dogs? Subtyping auditory verbal hallucinations and its implications for research and practice.

The phenomenological diversity of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) is not currently accounted for by any model based around a single mechanism. This has led to the proposal that there may be distinct AVH subtypes, which each possess unique (as well as shared) underpinning mechanisms. This could have important implications both for research design and clinical interventions because different subtypes may be responsive to different types of treatment.

Abnormal dynamics of language in schizophrenia.

Language could be conceptualized as a dynamic system that includes multiple interactive levels (sub-lexical, lexical, sentence, and discourse) and components (phonology, semantics, and syntax). In schizophrenia, abnormalities are observed at all language elements (levels and components) but the dynamic between these elements remains unclear. We hypothesize that the dynamics between language elements in schizophrenia is abnormal and explore how this dynamic is altered.

Auditory verbal hallucinations result from combinatoric associations of multiple neural events.

While Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVH) refer to specific experiences shared by all subjects who have AVH-the perception of auditory speech without corresponding external stimuli, the characteristics of these experiences differ from one subject to another. These characteristics include aspects such as the location of AVH (inside or outside the head), the linguistic complexity of AVH (hearing words, sentences, or conversations), the range of content of AVH (repetitive or systematized content), and many other variables. In another word, AVH are phenomenologically heterogeneous experiences.

Multidimensional analysis of the abnormal neural oscillations associated with lexical processing in schizophrenia.

The neural mechanisms of language abnormalities, the core symptoms in schizophrenia, remain unclear. In this study, a new experimental paradigm, combining magnetoencephalography (MEG) techniques and machine intelligence methodologies, was designed to gain knowledge about the frequency, brain location, and time of occurrence of the neural oscillations that are associated with lexical processing in schizophrenia. The 248-channel MEG recordings were obtained from 12 patients with schizophrenia and 10 healthy controls, during a lexical processing task, where the patients discriminated correct from incorrect lexical stimuli that were visually presented.

Selection of abnormal neural oscillation patterns associated with sentence-level language disorder in Schizophrenia.

Language disorder is one of the core symptoms in schizophrenia. We propose a new framework based on machine intelligence techniques to investigate abnormal neural oscillations related to this impairment. Schizophrenia patients and healthy control subjects were instructed to discriminate semantically and syntactically correct sentences from syntactically correct but semantically incorrect sentences presented visually, and 248-channel MEG signals were recorded with a whole head machine during the task performance.

The temporal, spatial, and frequency dimensions of neural oscillations associated with verbal working memory.

Cognitive operations engage neural generators oscillating at different frequencies distributed in time and space. Accordingly, oscillatory activity detected by magnetoencephalography (MEG)/electroencephalography (EEG) should be analyzed along frequency, time, and spatial dimensions. MEG data were obtained from 19 healthy individuals while performing a modified Sternberg paradigm.

Maintaining information online in discrete time; rethinking working memory processes.

Linguistic operations occur with verbal information maintained online for a discrete time. It is posited that online maintenance of information is accomplished by verbal working memory (WM), a system that is: (a) independent from the linguistic operations carried out with the information (specialized), and (b) consists of a holding place where information is held in a phonological code (phonological loop) and a rehearsal mechanism that refreshes the phonological loop. This model does not account for the serial position effects associated with information maintenance and additional models are needed to explain the latter effects, which leaves us with a disjointed understanding of online maintenance of information.

The characteristic features of auditory verbal hallucinations in clinical and nonclinical groups: state-of-the-art overview and future directions.

Despite a growing interest in auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) in different clinical and nonclinical groups, the phenomenological characteristics of such experiences have not yet been reviewed and contrasted, limiting our understanding of these phenomena on multiple empirical, theoretical, and clinical levels. We look at some of the most prominent descriptive features of AVHs in schizophrenia (SZ). These are then examined in clinical conditions including substance abuse, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, dementia, late-onset SZ, mood disorders, borderline personality disorder, hearing impairment, and dissociative disorders.

Correlation of the vesicular acetylcholine transporter densities in the striata to the clinical abilities of women with Rett syndrome.

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a neurodevelopmental disability characterized by mutations in the X-linked methyl-CpG-binding protein 2 located at the Xq28 region. The severity is modified in part by X chromosomal inactivation resulting in wide clinical variability. We hypothesized that the ability to perform the activities of daily living (ADL) is correlated with the density of vesicular acetylcholine transporters in the striata of women with RTT.