Epilepsy in tuberous sclerosis complex: Findings from the TOSCA Study.

Objective: To present the baseline data of the international TuberOus SClerosis registry to increase disease Awareness (TOSCA) with emphasis on the characteristics of epilepsies associated with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC).

Methods: Retrospective and prospective patients' data on all aspects of TSC were collected from multiple countries worldwide. Epilepsy variables included seizure type, age at onset, type of treatment, and treatment outcomes and association with genotype, seizures control, and intellectual disability.

Long-term Association of 13-Valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine Implementation With Rates of Community-Acquired Pneumonia in Children.

Importance: In several countries, 5 years after 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) implementation, serotype replacement has been reported for invasive pneumococcal disease, which raises concerns about the long-term outcome of PCV13 implementation. The long-term effect of vaccination on community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) remains unknown.

Objective: To assess the long-term outcome of PCV13 implementation on CAP in children.

Exercise Does Not Protect against Peripheral and Central Effects of a High Cholesterol Diet Given in Old ApoE Mice.

Advanced atherosclerosis increases inflammation and stroke risk in the cerebral vasculature. Exercise is known to improve cardio-metabolic profiles when associated with a caloric restriction, but it remains debated whether it is still beneficial without the dietary control. The aim of this study was to determine both the peripheral and central effects of exercise training combined with a cholesterol-rich diet given in old ApoE mice.

Temporally Regular Musical Primes Facilitate Subsequent Syntax Processing in Children with Specific Language Impairment.

Children with developmental language disorders have been shown to be also impaired in rhythm and meter perception. Temporal processing and its link to language processing can be understood within the dynamic attending theory. An external stimulus can stimulate internal oscillators, which orient attention over time and drive speech signal segmentation to provide benefits for syntax processing, which is impaired in various patient populations.

Odor Perception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and its Relationship to Food Neophobia.

Atypical sensory functioning in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been well documented in the last decade for the visual, tactile and auditory systems, but olfaction in ASD is still understudied. The aim of the present study was to examine whether children with ASD and neuro-typically (NT) developed children differed in odor perception, at the cognitive (familiarity and identification ability), sensorimotor (olfactory exploration) and affective levels (hedonic evaluation). Because an important function of the sense of smell is its involvement in eating, from food selection to appreciation and recognition, a potential link between odor perception and food neophobia was also investigated.

Implicit learning of predictable sound sequences modulates human brain responses at different levels of the auditory hierarchy.

Deviant stimuli, violating regularities in a sensory environment, elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN), largely described in the Event-Related Potential literature. While it is widely accepted that the MMN reflects more than basic change detection, a comprehensive description of mental processes modulating this response is still lacking. Within the framework of predictive coding, deviance processing is part of an inference process where prediction errors (the mismatch between incoming sensations and predictions established through experience) are minimized.

Altered retrieval of melodic information in congenital amusia: insights from dynamic causal modeling of MEG data.

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder that primarily manifests as a difficulty in the perception and memory of pitch-based materials, including music. Recent findings have shown that the amusic brain exhibits altered functioning of a fronto-temporal network during pitch perception and short-term memory. Within this network, during the encoding of melodies, a decreased right backward frontal-to-temporal connectivity was reported in amusia, along with an abnormal connectivity within and between auditory cortices.

Cellular and molecular cues of glucose sensing in the rat olfactory bulb.

In the brain, glucose homeostasis of extracellular fluid is crucial to the point that systems specifically dedicated to glucose sensing are found in areas involved in energy regulation and feeding behavior. Olfaction is a major sensory modality regulating food consumption. Nutritional status in turn modulates olfactory detection.

Tool use imagery triggers tool incorporation in the body schema.

Tool-use has been shown to modify the way the brain represents the metrical characteristics of the effector controlling the tool. For example, the use of tools that elongate the physical length of the arm induces kinematic changes affecting selectively the transport component of subsequent free-hand movements. Although mental simulation of an action is known to involve -to a large extent- the same processes as those at play in overt motor execution, whether tool-use imagery can yield similar effects on the body representation remains unknown.

Alpha reactivity to first names differs in subjects with high and low dream recall frequency.

Studies in cognitive psychology showed that personality (openness to experience, thin boundaries, absorption), creativity, nocturnal awakenings, and attitude toward dreams are significantly related to dream recall frequency (DRF). These results suggest the possibility of neurophysiological trait differences between subjects with high and low DRF. To test this hypothesis we compared sleep characteristics and alpha reactivity to sounds in subjects with high and low DRF using polysomnographic recordings and electroencephalography (EEG).

The influence of chronotype on making music: circadian fluctuations in pianists' fine motor skills.

Making music on a professional level requires a maximum of sensorimotor precision. Chronotype-dependent fluctuations of sensorimotor precision in the course of the day may prove a challenge for musicians because public performances or recordings are usually scheduled at fixed times of the day. We investigated pianists' sensorimotor timing precision in a scale playing task performed in the morning and in the evening.

Individuality That is Unheard of: Systematic Temporal Deviations in Scale Playing Leave an Inaudible Pianistic Fingerprint.

Whatever we do, we do it in our own way, and we recognize master artists by small samples of their work. This study investigates individuality of temporal deviations in musical scales in pianists in the absence of deliberate expressive intention. Note-by-note timing deviations away from regularity form a remarkably consistent "pianistic fingerprint.

Odor mental imagery in non-experts in odors: a paradox?

In agreement with the theoretical framework stipulating that mental images arise from neural activity in early sensory cortices, the primary olfactory cortex [i.e., the piriform cortex (PC)] is activated when non-olfactory-experts try to generate odor mental images.

Advanced Parkinson's disease effect on goal-directed and habitual processes involved in visuomotor associative learning.

The present behavioral study re-addresses the question of habit learning in Parkinson's disease (PD). Patients were early onset, non-demented, dopa-responsive, candidates for surgical treatment, similar to those we found earlier as suffering greater dopamine depletion in the putamen than in the caudate nucleus. The task was the same conditional associative learning task as that used previously in monkeys and healthy humans to unveil the striatum involvement in habit learning.

Fingers Phrase Music Differently: Trial-to-Trial Variability in Piano Scale Playing and Auditory Perception Reveal Motor Chunking.

We investigated how musical phrasing and motor sequencing interact to yield timing patterns in the conservatory students' playing piano scales. We propose a novel analysis method that compared the measured note onsets to an objectively regular scale fitted to the data. Subsequently, we segment the timing variability into (i) systematic deviations from objective evenness that are perhaps residuals of expressive timing or of perceptual biases and (ii) non-systematic deviations that can be interpreted as motor execution errors, perhaps due to noise in the nervous system.

Sleep-waking discharge of ventral tuberomammillary neurons in wild-type and histidine decarboxylase knock-out mice.

Using extracellular single-unit recordings, we have determined the characteristics of neurons in the ventral tuberomammillary nucleus (VTM) of wild-type (WT) and histidine decarboxylase knock-out (HDC-KO) mice during the sleep-waking cycle. The VTM neurons of HDC-KO mice showed no histamine immunoreactivity, but were immunoreactive for the histaminergic (HA) neuron markers adenosine deaminase and glutamic acid decarboxylase 67. In the VTM of WT mice, we found waking (W)-specific, non-W-specific W-active, sleep-active, W and paradoxical sleep (PS)-active, and state-indifferent neuron groups.