Attention Dysregulation in Breast Cancer Patients Following a Complementary Alternative Treatment Routine: A Double-Blind Randomized Trial.

Introduction: Breast cancer patients and survivors frequently report fatigue, emotional, and cognitive disturbances, which reduce performance at all levels of occupation and make life quality issues a considerable clinical concern. The aim of this study is to evaluate attention and emotion regulation across radiotherapy period and the possible effects of complementary alternative medicine (CAM).

Methods: Fifty-seven patients with unilateral breast cancer underwent surgery and systemic chemotherapy before participating in this double-blind randomized study.

High resolution behavioral and neural activity representation using a geometrical approach.

Available tools for recording neuronal activity are limited and reductive due to massive data arising from high-frequency measurements. We have developed a method that utilizes variance within the physiological activity and includes all data points per measurement. Data is expressed geometrically in a physiologically meaningful manner, to represent a precise and detailed view of the recorded neural activity.

Evidence for social cooperation in rodents by automated maze.

Social cooperation is defined as a joint action for mutual benefit that depends on the individual and the counterparts' behaviors. To gain valid evidence for social cooperation behavior we conducted a series of experiments in our suggested fully automated non-conditioned maze and depicted three major findings: (i) During 18 days of training the rats showed a progressive social learning curve as well as latent social learning; (ii) Examining the perceptual communication between the cooperating partners, we found a correlation between the available perceptual modalities and the social cooperation performance; and (iii) Investigating contextual learning as a competing process to the social cooperation, we found that additional contextual cues impaired the social cooperation performance. In conclusion, our suggested automated cooperation maze is designed to further our understanding of social cooperation under normal conditions, such as decision-making, and to examine the neural basis of social cooperation.

l-Carnitine improves cognitive and renal functions in a rat model of chronic kidney disease.

Over the past decade, the prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) has reached epidemic proportions. The search for novel pharmacological treatment for CKD has become an area of intensive clinical research. l-Carnitine, considered as the "gatekeeper" responsible for admitting long chain fatty acids into cell mitochondria.

Quinazoline-based tricyclic compounds that regulate programmed cell death, induce neuronal differentiation, and are curative in animal models for excitotoxicity and hereditary brain disease.

Expanding on a quinazoline scaffold, we developed tricyclic compounds with biological activity. These compounds bind to the 18 kDa translocator protein (TSPO) and protect U118MG (glioblastoma cell line of glial origin) cells from glutamate-induced cell death. Fascinating, they can induce neuronal differentiation of PC12 cells (cell line of pheochromocytoma origin with neuronal characteristics) known to display neuronal characteristics, including outgrowth of neurites, tubulin expression, and NeuN (antigen known as 'neuronal nuclei', also known as Rbfox3) expression.