Alterations of Functional Connectivity Dynamics in Affective and Psychotic Disorders.

Background: Patients with psychosis and patients with depression exhibit widespread neurobiological abnormalities. The analysis of dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) allows for the detection of changes in complex brain activity patterns, providing insights into common and unique processes underlying these disorders.

Methods: We report the analysis of dFC in a large sample including 127 patients at clinical high risk for psychosis, 142 patients with recent-onset psychosis, 134 patients with recent-onset depression, and 256 healthy control participants.

Stroking in early mother-infant exchanges: The role of maternal tactile biography and interoceptive sensibility.

Caress-like is a crucial component of caregiving and a key factor in mother-infant interactions. Mother's experience of touch during her own childhood (i.e.

Neurorestorative effects of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation on social prediction of adolescents and young adults with congenital cerebellar malformations.

Background: Converging evidence points to impairments of the predictive function exerted by the cerebellum as one of the causes of the social cognition deficits observed in patients with cerebellar disorders.

Objective: We tested the neurorestorative effects of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (ctDCS) on the use of contextual expectations to interpret actions occurring in ambiguous sensory sceneries in a sample of adolescents and young adults with congenital, non-progressive cerebellar malformation (CM).

Methods: We administered an action prediction task in which, in an implicit-learning phase, the probability of co-occurrence between actions and contextual elements was manipulated to form either strongly or moderately informative expectations.

Contextual Priors Shape Action Understanding before and beyond the Unfolding of Movement Kinematics.

Previous studies have shown that contextual information may aid in guessing the intention underlying others' actions in conditions of perceptual ambiguity. Here, we aimed to evaluate the temporal deployment of contextual influence on action prediction with increasing availability of kinematic information during the observation of ongoing actions. We used action videos depicting an actor grasping an object placed on a container to perform individual or interpersonal actions featuring different kinematic profiles.

Low back pain as main symptom in Low-grade Appendiceal Mucinous Neoplasm (LAMN): A case report.

Background: Low back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide. It is also the main cause of the limitation of activities and absence from work in much of the world and a cause of great economic burden. The greatest percentage of low back pain is classified as nonspecific (i.

How previous experience shapes future affective subjective ratings: A follow-up study investigating implicit learning and cue ambiguity.

People use their previous experience to predict future affective events. Since we live in ever-changing environments, affective predictions must generalize from past contexts (from which they may be implicitly learned) to new, potentially ambiguous contexts. This study investigated how past (un)certain relationships influence subjective experience following new ambiguous cues, and whether past relationships can be learned implicitly.

Rules generalization in children with dyslexia.

Background: Rule learning (RL) is the ability to extract and generalize higher-order repetition-based structures. Children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) often report difficulties in learning complex regularities in sequential stimuli, which might be due to the complexity of the rule to be learned. Learning high-order repetition-based rules represents a building block for the development of language skills.

Remote treatment of developmental dyslexia: how ADHD comorbidity, clinical history and treatment repetition may affect its efficacy.

Introduction: Tachidino is a web-based platform for remote treatment of reading and spelling disorders. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the possible impact of different clinical conditions on the efficacy of treatment. The focus was on possible ADHD comorbidity-related effects on the outcomes of the Tachidino treatment, and the impact of previous treatments, such as speech and language therapy or the repetition of the same Tachidino program.

Dinucleotide biases in the genomes of prokaryotic and eukaryotic dsDNA viruses and their hosts.

The genomes of cellular organisms display CpG and TpA dinucleotide composition biases. Such biases have been poorly investigated in dsDNA viruses. Here, we show that in dsDNA virus, bacterial, and eukaryotic genomes, the representation of TpA and CpG dinucleotides is strongly dependent on genomic G + C content.

An "epileptic scent": Olfactory auras in tumor-related epilepsy.

Objectives: To characterize a profile for patients with tumor-related epilepsy presenting olfactory auras.

Materials And Methods: We conducted a monocentric, retrospective study on patients who underwent surgery in the Neurosurgery Unit of Udine University Hospital (Udine, Italy), between the 1st of January 2010 and the 1st of January 2019, for primary brain tumors (PBTs) involving the temporal lobe and the insula. All patients were affected by tumor-related epilepsy; the study group presented olfactory auras as well.

The challenge of remote treatment in neuropsychological intervention for reading and spelling in dyslexia: A prospective observational cohort study.

Telemedicine approaches have proved to be valuable solutions for the delivery of treatment for many health-related issues, and crucial during the pandemics. Nonetheless, the efficacy of such Web-based practices in developmental dyslexia needs to be thoroughly evaluated. To this aim, the effects of a multi-componential program for neuropsychological intervention in dyslexia delivered as an outpatient program were compared with those obtained with a remotely delivered, Web-based treatment, based on the same methodological principles and delivered with the same duration and intensity.

Physical activity practiced at a young age is associated with a less severe subsequent clinical presentation in facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy.

Background: In facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), it is not known whether physical activity (PA) practiced at young age is associated with the clinical presentation of disease. To assess this issue, we performed a retrospective cohort study concerning the previous practice of sports and, among them, those with medium-high cardiovascular commitment in clinically categorized carriers of a D4Z4 reduced allele (DRA).

Methods: People aged between 18 and 60 were recruited as being DRA carriers.

Altered spread of waves of activities at large scale is influenced by cortical thickness organization in temporal lobe epilepsy: a magnetic resonance imaging-high-density electroencephalography study.

Temporal lobe epilepsy is a brain network disorder characterized by alterations at both the structural and the functional levels. It remains unclear how structure and function are related and whether this has any clinical relevance. In the present work, we adopted a novel methodological approach investigating how network structural features influence the large-scale dynamics.

Social cognition in two brothers with Becker muscular dystrophy: an exploratory study revealing divergent behavioral phenotypes.

Background And Objective: Only few studies investigated social cognition in Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD). However, brain dystrophin deficiency could be a neural substrate for cognitive, emotional, and neuropsychological features in BMD.

Methods: We compared interoceptive accuracy and interpersonal comfort distance in two brothers with BMD presenting with the same genetic deletion and a healthy control.

Twenty years of emotional-behavioral problems of community adolescents living in Italy measured through the Achenbach system of empirically based assessment (ASEBA): a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: This is a systematic review and meta-analysis of emotional and behavioral problems among Italian community adolescents in the last 20 years, as assessed through the ASEBA questionnaires CBCL 6-18, YSR 11-18 and TRF 6-18. Research questions address: (1) pooled means of problems' scores in questionnaires scales; (2-3) variations in scores according to sociodemographic and time-related factors, and studies' quality; (4) trends in research with ASEBA instruments along with other outcomes, e.g.

A narrative review of the use of a cutting-edge virtual reality rehabilitation technology in neurological and neuropsychological rehabilitation.

Background: Virtual reality (VR) interventions have been increasingly used in the rehabilitation of a wide range of neurological and neuropsychological dysfunctions. Findings of previous reviews showed positive and promising effects of VR-based interventions. However, they summarized findings on VR-based intervention carried out through different VR systems and tasks.

Two Years of Active Pharmacovigilance Surveillance and Therapeutic Reconciliation in Frail Populations: The MEAP 3.0 Study.

Awareness related to the risk/benefit profile of therapies used in paediatric and elderly patients is limited. We carried out a study, called the MEAP 3.0 study, to collect and analyse evidence of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and drug-drug interactions (DDIs) that occurred in frail populations under polypharmacy in a real-world setting.

Effectiveness of rehabilitation intervention in persons with Friedreich ataxia.

Introduction: The relevance of rehabilitation in progressive neurological disorders, such as Friedreich's Ataxia (FRDA), has yet to be convincingly proven. FRDA is characterized by ataxia, loss of gait, scoliosis, cardiomyopathy, dysarthria and dysphagia, with reduced life expectancy. The disease onset is usually in adolescence, leading to progressive disability.

Prolonged neural encoding of visual information in autism.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with a hyper-focused visual attentional style, impacting higher-order social and affective domains. The understanding of such peculiarity can benefit from the use of multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) data, which has proved to be a powerful technique to investigate the hidden neural dynamics orchestrating sensory and cognitive processes. Here, we recorded EEG in typically developing (TD) children and in children with ASD during a visuo-spatial attentional task where attention was exogenously captured by a small (zoom-in) or large (zoom-out) cue in the visual field before the appearance of a target at different eccentricities.

Neuropsychological Functioning in Bilateral versus Unilateral Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.

Although relatively specific anatomo-electro-clinical features of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) with bilateral ictal involvement (bitemporal epilepsy-BTLE) have been described, differentiating between BTLE and unilateral TLE (UTLE) remains challenging. Surgery is often the treatment of choice for drug-resistant UTLE, whereas its use is more controversial in BTLE. It is currently unclear whether neuropsychological assessment can contribute to the differential diagnosis.

From neural noise to co-adaptability: Rethinking the multifaceted architecture of motor variability.

In the last decade, the source and the functional meaning of motor variability have attracted considerable attention in behavioral and brain sciences. This construct classically combined different levels of description, variable internal robustness or coherence, and multifaceted operational meanings. We provide here a comprehensive review of the literature with the primary aim of building a precise lexicon that goes beyond the generic and monolithic use of motor variability.