Erythropoietin attenuates motor impairments induced by bilateral renal ischemia/reperfusion in rats

Neurologic sequelae remain a common and destructive problem in patients with acute kidney injury. The objective of this study was to evaluate the possible neuroprotective effect of erythropoietin (EPO) on motor impairments following bilateral renal ischemia (BRI) in two time points after reperfusion: short term (24 h) and long term (1 week). Male Wistar rats underwent BRI or sham surgery. EPO or saline administration was performed 30 min before surgery (1000 U/kg, i.p.). Explorative behaviors and motor function of the rats were evaluated by open field, rotarod, and wire grip tests. Plasma concentrations of blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine (Cr) were significantly enhanced in BRI rats 24 h after reperfusion. BRI group had only an increased level of BUN but not Cr 1 week after reperfusion. Impairment of balance function by BRI was not reversed by EPO 24 h after reperfusion, but counteracted 7 days after renal ischemia. Muscle strength had no significant differences between the groups. BRI group had a decrease in locomotor activity, and EPO could not reverse this reduction in both time points of the experiment. Although EPO could not be offered as a potential neuroprotective agent in the treatment of motor dysfunctions induced by BRI, it could be effective against balance dysfunction 1 week after renal ischemia.     

Pinpointing the neural signatures of single-exposure visual recognition memory

Memories of the images that we have seen are thought to be reflected in the reduction of neural responses in high-level visual areas such as inferotemporal (IT) cortex, a phenomenon known as repetition suppression (RS). We challenged this hypothesis with a task that required rhesus monkeys to report whether images were novel or repeated while ignoring variations in contrast, a stimulus attribute that is also known to modulate the overall IT response. The monkeys’ behavior was largely contrast invariant, contrary to the predictions of an RS-inspired decoder, which could not distinguish responses to images that are repeated from those that are of lower contrast. However, the monkeys’ behavioral patterns were well predicted by a linearly decodable variant in which the total spike count was corrected for contrast modulation. These results suggest that the IT neural activity pattern that best aligns with single-exposure visual recognition memory behavior is not RS but rather sensory referenced suppression: reductions in IT population response magnitude, corrected for sensory modulation.

Under the right conditions, we are very good at remembering the images that we have seen: we can remember thousands of images after viewing each only once and only for a few seconds (1, 2). How our brains support this remarkable ability, often called “visual recognition memory” (3), is not well understood. The most prominent proposal to date suggests that memories about whether images have been encountered before are signaled in high-level visual brain areas such as inferotemporal cortex (IT) and perirhinal cortex via adaptation-like reductions of the population response to repeated as compared to novel stimuli, a phenomenon referred to as repetition suppression (RS) (4–9). Repetition suppression exhibits the primary attributes needed to account for the vast capacity of single-exposure visual memory behavior: response decrements in subsequent exposures are selective for image identity (even after viewing an extensive sequence of other images), and last for several minutes to hours (5, 6, 10). RS has also been shown to account for behavior in an image recognition memory task: a linear decoder with positive weights can predict single-exposure visual recognition memory behavior from neural responses in IT cortex (10).Despite the fact that the RS hypothesis is consistent with available evidence, it seems likely to be too simplistic an explanation for visual recognition memory encoding. In particular, it is well known that sensory neurons such as those of IT cortex are modulated not only by image memory, but also by stimulus properties such as image contrast (11). It is thus unclear whether and how these stimulus-induced effects interfere with judgments of whether images are novel or have been encountered before, and if they do not, how image memory can be decoded from neural responses in a way that disambiguates it from changes in these stimulus properties. To investigate this, we measured behavioral and neural responses of monkeys trained to report whether images were novel or repeated while disregarding image contrast (Fig. 1A).Open in a separate windowFig. 1.Visual memory behavior. (A) The contrast-invariant, single-exposure visual memory task. The monkeys viewed a sequence of images and reported whether they were novel (never seen before) or repeated (seen exactly once) while ignoring randomized changes in contrast. Monkeys were trained to saccade to one of two response targets to indicate their choice (red arrows). Images were repeated with a randomly chosen delay between the first and repeated presentation (“n-back”). (B) Images were displayed at one of two contrast levels, yielding two conditions for novel images, high (H) and low (L), and four conditions for repeated images: HH (repeated H preceded by novel H), LL (repeated L preceded by novel L), HL (repeated L preceded by novel H), and LH (repeated H preceded by novel L). The four repeated conditions were organized into same-contrast and mixed-contrast groups depending on whether the initial and repeated presentations were at the same or different contrasts, respectively. (C) Behavioral performance for the data pooled across monkeys in the task, where small black dots indicate average performance for an individual session and large colored dots indicate the average performance across sessions. A measure of contrast invariance, I, was computed as the ratio of the variance across contrast conditions and the variance with respect to the maximally contrast-modulated pattern after taking overall performance into account, subtracted from 1 (SI Appendix, SI Methods). Insets illustrate the expected behavioral pattern with minimal (I = 0) and maximal (I = 1) contrast invariance.     

Radioprotective Effect of Achillea millefolium L Against Genotoxicity Induced by Ionizing Radiation in Human Normal Lymphocytes

The radioprotective effect of Achillea millefolium L (ACM) extract was investigated against genotoxicity induced by ionizing radiation (IR) in human lymphocytes. Peripheral blood samples were collected from human volunteers and incubated with the methanolic extract of ACM at different concentrations (10, 50, 100, and 200 μg/mL) for 2 hours. At each dose point, the whole blood was exposed in vitro to 2.5 Gy of X-ray and then the lymphocytes were cultured with mitogenic stimulation to determine the micronuclei in cytokinesis-blocked binucleated cell. Antioxidant capacity of the extract was determined using free radical-scavenging method. The treatment of lymphocytes with the extract showed a significant decrease in the incidence of micronuclei binucleated cells, as compared with similarly irradiated lymphocytes without any extract treatment. The maximum protection and decrease in frequency of micronuclei were observed at 200 μg/mL of ACM extract which completely protected genotoxicity induced by IR in human lymphocytes. Achillea millefolium extract exhibited concentration-dependent radical-scavenging activity on 1,1-diphenyl-2-picryl hydrazyl free radicals. These data suggest that the methanolic extract of ACM may play an important role in the protection of normal tissues against genetic damage induced by IR.     

Cost-Effectiveness of Endovascular Versus Open Repair of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm: A Systematic Review

Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy - Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a life-threatening condition which, in the absence of increasing diameter or rupture, often remains asymptomatic, and a...     

The effect of bioengineered acellular collagen patch on cardiac remodeling and ventricular function post myocardial infarction

Regeneration of the damaged myocardium is one of the most challenging fronts in the field of tissue engineering due to the limited capacity of adult heart tissue to heal and to the mechanical and structural constraints of the cardiac tissue. In this study we demonstrate that an engineered acellular scaffold comprising type I collagen, endowed with specific physiomechanical properties, improves cardiac function when used as a cardiac patch following myocardial infarction. Patches were grafted onto the infarcted myocardium in adult murine hearts immediately after ligation of left anterior descending artery and the physiological outcomes were monitored by echocardiography, and by hemodynamic and histological analyses four weeks post infarction. In comparison to infarcted hearts with no treatment, hearts bearing patches preserved contractility and significantly protected the cardiac tissue from injury at the anatomical and functional levels. This improvement was accompanied by attenuated left ventricular remodeling, diminished fibrosis, and formation of a network of interconnected blood vessels within the infarct. Histological and immunostaining confirmed integration of the patch with native cardiac cells including fibroblasts, smooth muscle cells, epicardial cells, and immature cardiomyocytes. In summary, an acellular biomaterial with specific biomechanical properties promotes the endogenous capacity of the infarcted myocardium to attenuate remodeling and improve heart function following myocardial infarction.     

Elder abuse among Spanish and Iranian people: new methodological approach to the same old story

International Journal of Legal Medicine - Elder abuse continues to be a taboo, mostly underestimated, ignored by societies across the world. Recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses have...