6,319 results match your criteria: "Hotchkiss Brain Institute; Owerko Centre.[Affiliation]"

The Ethanolic Extract of Polygala paniculata L. Blocks Panx1 Channels and Reduces Ischemic Brain Infarct in a Dose- and Sex-Dependent Way.

Mol Neurobiol

September 2024

Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Dr. NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada.

Polygala paniculata L. is a native plant from tropical America. The therapeutic potential of the hydroalcoholic extract of P.

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Narrative Accounts of Youth and Their Mothers With Chronic Headache: Application of a Socio-narratology Framework to Pain Narratives.

Clin J Pain

October 2024

Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Owerko Centre, Calgary, Canada.

Objectives: This study was the first to apply a socio-narratology framework to the narratives about child pain as told by youth with chronic pain and their parents, all of whom experience chronic headaches.

Background: Storytelling is a powerful social transaction that occurs within systems (eg, families, clinical encounters) and is both shaped by, and can shape, the pain experience. Narrative can be harnessed as a clinical tool to aid in the ability to listen, understand, and improve clinical encounters.

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White matter disconnection impacts proprioception post-stroke.

PLoS One

September 2024

Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Proprioceptive impairments occur in approximately 50-64% of people following stroke. While much is known about the grey matter structures underlying proprioception, our understanding of the white matter correlates of proprioceptive impairments is less well developed. It is recognised that behavioural impairments post-stroke are often the result of disconnection between wide-scale brain networks, however the disconnectome associated with proprioception post-stroke is unknown.

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Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have associated intronic variants in , encoding cAMP-specific phosphodiesterase-4B (PDE4B), with increased risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as schizophrenia and substance use disorders that are often comorbid with it. However, the pathophysiological mechanisms of genetic risk involving PDE4B are poorly understood. To examine the effects of PDE4B variation on phenotypes with translational relevance to psychiatric disorders, we focused on PDE4B missense variant M220T, which is present in the human genome as rare coding variant rs775201287.

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Pearls & Oy-sters: Tumour-Like Mass Lesion Secondary to Primary CNS Vasculitis.

Neurology

October 2024

From the Departments of Clinical Neurosciences (J.I.R., R.K.) and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (D.N.), and the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (J.I.R.), University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Neuroimmunology Centre, Department of Neurology (J.I.R.), Royal Melbourne Hospital; and Clinical Outcomes Research Unit, Department of Medicine (J.I.R.), University of Melbourne, Australia.

Primary CNS vasculitis (PCNSV) is uncommonly considered in the differential diagnosis of tumor-like lesions. This case report of tumefactive PCNSV highlights imaging features that should increase clinical suspicion for CNS vasculitis, potentially lending to earlier diagnosis and treatment. A 62-year-old man presented with a 1-month history of focal motor seizures and cortical sensory loss localizing to the right frontoparietal lobe.

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Article Synopsis
  • Physical inactivity during mid-life increases the risk of dementia, while mild behavioral impairment (MBI) may indicate early neurodegenerative changes.
  • The study analyzed data from CAN-PROTECT to examine how different types of physical activity (like cardiovascular exercise and physical labor) relate to MBI severity, finding a significant link.
  • Specifically, higher cardiovascular activity was associated with lower MBI severity (8.42% decrease per standard deviation increase), whereas increased physical labor led to higher MBI severity (5.64% increase), indicating the potential for cardiovascular exercise to mitigate dementia risk markers in older adults.
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Article Synopsis
  • Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) can indicate the presence of Alzheimer's disease (AD), with Mild Behavioral Impairment (MBI) highlighting persistent NPS in early-stage AD.
  • A study analyzed data from 1,273 participants with normal cognition or mild cognitive impairment to compare MBI with other non-MBI NPS, examining their relationships with brain imaging biomarkers and cognitive decline.
  • Results showed that MBI was linked to significant brain volume decreases and faster cognitive decline compared to non-MBI NPS, indicating that persistently emergent NPS are more strongly associated with neurodegenerative processes in AD.
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The intestinal barrier, a critical component of the body's defense system, plays a vital role in maintaining homeostasis by preventing the translocation of harmful substances from the gut lumen into the bloodstream. Disruptions in this barrier, often characterized by increased intestinal permeability, are increasingly recognized as contributors to the development and progression of various Chronic Inflammatory Disorders (CIDs). Zonulin, a key regulator of intestinal Tight Junctions (TJs), has emerged as a pivotal player in this process.

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Screening for depression in patients with epilepsy: same questions but different meaning to different patients.

Qual Life Res

December 2024

Department of Community Health Sciences & O'Brien Institute for Public Health, University of Calgary, 3280 Hospital Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 4Z6, Canada.

Purpose: Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) such as the Neurological Disorders Depression Inventory in Epilepsy (NDDI-E), a 6-item epilepsy-specific PROM, is used to screen for major depressive disorder symptoms for patients with epilepsy (PWE). The validity and interpretation of PROMs can be affected by differential item functioning (DIF), which occurs when subgroups of patients with the same underlying health status respond to and interpret questions about their health status differently. This study aims to determine whether NDDI-E items exhibit DIF and to identify subgroups of PWE that exhibit DIF in NDDI-E items.

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In the history of the neurological relationship between human behavior and brain function in Europe and North America, various perspectives on brain localization and holistic functioning have been addressed. One of the founding figures of modern neuropsychology, Professor Hans-Lukas Teuber (1916-1977) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reminded the scholarly community of its negligence of preceding traditions in day-to-day research endeavors. Teuber particularly emphasized that during the development of the aphasiology field (1950s-1960s) even major figures, such as the German-American neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), had been neglected in the scientific community's collective memory.

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Spare the pain for your gut Treg cells!

Trends Pharmacol Sci

October 2024

Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada. Electronic address:

Maintaining gut homeostasis requires a complex interplay between the nervous and immune systems and the microbiome, but the nature of their interactions remains unclear. Chiu and Benoist's teams employed designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs (DREADD)-based chemogenetics to target specific neuronal cell types and evaluate their effects on both the gut immune system and the microbiota.

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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Accumulation of misfolded proteins is central to the pathogenesis of ALS and the glymphatic system is emerging as a potential therapeutic target to reduce proteinopathy. Using diffusion tensor imaging analysis along the perivascular spaces (DTI-ALPS) to assess glymphatic function, we performed a longitudinal analysis of glymphatic function in ALS and compared it to a disorder in the motor neuron disease spectrum, primary lateral sclerosis (PLS).

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Plasma Biomarkers of Traumatic Brain Injury in Adolescents With Sport-Related Concussion.

JAMA Netw Open

September 2024

Sport Injury Prevention Research Centre, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Importance: Blood-based biomarkers may clarify underlying neuropathology and potentially assist in clinical management of adolescents with sport-related concussion (SRC).

Objective: To investigate the association between SRC and plasma biomarkers in adolescents.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Prospective cohort study in Canadian sport and clinic settings (Surveillance in High Schools and Community Sport to Reduce Concussions and Their Consequences study; September 2019 to November 2022).

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Aim: We examined associations among injury severity, white matter structural connectivity within functionally defined brain networks and psychosocial/adaptive outcomes in children with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Method: Participants included 58 youths (39 male) with complicated-mild TBI (cmTBI;  = 12, age =  12.6 ± 2.

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Background: Over the recent decades, continuous multi-modal monitoring of cerebral physiology has gained increasing interest for its potential to help minimize secondary brain injury following moderate-to-severe acute traumatic neural injury (also termed traumatic brain injury; TBI). Despite this heightened interest, there has yet to be a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of derangements in multimodal cerebral physiology on global cerebral physiologic insult burden. In this study, we offer a multi-center descriptive analysis of the associations between deranged cerebral physiology and cerebral physiologic insult burden.

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Visual input regulates melanophore differentiation.

Front Cell Dev Biol

August 2024

Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada.

Introduction: Developmental processes continue in organisms in which sensory systems have reached functional maturity, however, little research has focused on the influence of sensory input on cell and tissue development. Here, we explored the influence of visual system activity on the development of skin melanophores in .

Methods: Melanophore number was measured in X.

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Antipsychotic medications are essential when treating schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, but the efficacy and tolerability of these medications vary from person to person. This interindividual variation is likely mediated, at least in part, by epigenomic processes that have yet to be fully elucidated. Herein, we systematically identified and evaluated 65 studies that examine the influence of antipsychotic drugs on epigenomic changes, including global methylation (9 studies), genome-wide methylation (22 studies), candidate gene methylation (16 studies), and histone modification (18 studies).

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Objectives: The retinal age gap (RAG) is emerging as a potential biomarker for various diseases of the human body, yet its utility depends on machine learning models capable of accurately predicting biological retinal age from fundus images. However, training generalizable models is hindered by potential shortages of diverse training data. To overcome these obstacles, this work develops a novel and computationally efficient distributed learning framework for retinal age prediction.

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Running-induced neurogenesis reduces CA1 perineuronal net density without substantial temporal delay.

Mol Brain

September 2024

Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, HMRB 162, Health Sciences Centre, 3330 Hospital Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 4N1, Canada.

Aerobic exercise has many effects on brain function, particularly at the hippocampus. Exercise has been shown to increase the rate of adult neurogenesis within the dentate gyrus and decrease the density of perineuronal nets in area CA1. The relationship between the rate of neurogenesis and the density of perineuronal nets in CA1 is robust; however, these studies only ever examined these effects across longer time scales, with running manipulations of 4 weeks or longer.

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Neurovascular coupling during hypercapnia in cerebral blood flow regulation.

Nat Commun

September 2024

Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, T2N 4N1, Canada.

Neuronal activity consumes cellular energy and generates carbon dioxide (CO). To counter this metabolic challenge, synaptic signalling communicates with nearby microvasculature to increase local blood flow. Is this process solely based on feedforward synaptic signalling, or is the generated CO also involved? This question was addressed in mice in a new Nature Communications publication by Tournissac and colleagues where they showed that neurovascular coupling is not affected by exogenous CO or its associated acidification.

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Article Synopsis
  • Artificial intelligence in medicine usually faces challenges related to small, non-diverse patient data due to privacy concerns, but federated learning (FL) offers a solution by allowing training across different hospitals without sharing sensitive data.
  • The newly developed FL-PedBrain platform is specifically designed for pediatric brain tumors, enabling collaborative training for tumor classification and segmentation across 19 international centers, addressing the lack of diverse datasets in this area.
  • FL-PedBrain shows impressive performance metrics, maintaining almost equivalent accuracy to centralized data training while significantly improving segmentation performance by 20 to 30% at external sites, and allows for the examination of data variability in real-world situations.
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Intravenous alteplase versus tenecteplase in patients with acute posterior circulation strokes: A secondary analysis from the AcT randomized controlled trial.

J Stroke Cerebrovasc Dis

November 2024

Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada; Department of Internal Medicine-Neurology Division, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada.

Article Synopsis
  • The study examines the safety and effectiveness of intravenous tenecteplase compared to alteplase in treating patients with acute ischemic strokes in the posterior circulation.
  • A post-hoc analysis of over 1,500 patients found no significant differences in outcomes between the two treatments in terms of recovery, symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage, and mortality.
  • Both medications showed similar rates of successful reperfusion and recanalization, suggesting that tenecteplase can be as effective as alteplase for this type of stroke without increased risks.
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Article Synopsis
  • This study explored the recovery trajectories of Dizziness-Related Disability (DRD) in kids aged 8-17 who experienced concussions, using evaluations over 6 months.
  • Two main recovery groups were identified: a Low DRD group (79% of participants) and a High DRD group (21%).
  • Key factors predicting membership in the High DRD group included chronic neck pain, existing anxiety issues, and scores from a specific assessment tool (the 5P total score), highlighting the need for personalized treatment approaches.
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