Neuromodulators

Cerebrovascular accidents, also known as strokes, represent a major global public health challenge and contribute to substantial mortality, disability, and socioeconomic burden. Multidisciplinary approaches for poststroke therapies are crucial for recovering lost functions and adapting to new limitations. This review discusses the potential of neuromodulation techniques, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), transcranial direct current stimulation, spinal cord stimulation (SCS), vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), and deep brain stimulation (DBS), as innovative strategies for facilitating poststroke recovery...

Learning new motor skills is often challenged by sensory mismatches. For reliable sensory information, people have actively employed sensory intervention methods. Visual assistance is the most popular method to provide sensory information, which is equivalent to the knowledge of performance (KP) in motor tasks. However, its efficacy is questionable because of visual-proprioceptive mismatch as well as heavy intrinsic visual and cognitive engagement in motor tasks. Electrotactile intervention is a promising technique to address the current limitations, as it provides KP using tactile feedback that has a close neurophysiological association with proprioception...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a device-based neuromodulation technique increasingly used to treat brain diseases. Electric field (E-field) modeling is an important technique in several TMS clinical applications, including the precision stimulation of brain targets with accurate stimulation density for the treatment of mental disorders and the localization of brain function areas for neurosurgical planning. Classical methods for E-field modeling usually take a long computation time. Fast algorithms are usually developed with significantly lower spatial resolutions that reduce the prediction accuracy and limit their usage in real-time or near real-time TMS applications...

Transcranial ultrasonic neuromodulation is a rapidly burgeoning field where low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS), with exquisite spatial resolution and deep tissue penetration, is used to non-invasively activate or suppress neural activity in specific brain regions. Over the past decade, there has been a rapid increase of tFUS neuromodulation studies in healthy humans and subjects with central nervous system (CNS) disease conditions, including a recent surge of clinical investigations in patients...

Background: Movement and tone disorders in children and young adults with cerebral palsy are a great source of disability. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of basal ganglia targets has a major role in the treatment of isolated dystonias, but its efficacy in dyskinetic cerebral palsy (DCP) is lower, due to structural basal ganglia and thalamic damage and lack of improvement of comorbid choreoathetosis and spasticity. The cerebellum is an attractive target for DBS in DCP since it is frequently spared from hypoxic ischemic damage, it has a significant role in dystonia network models, and small studies have shown promise of dentate stimulation in improving CP-related movement and tone disorders...

Risk taking behavior is a symptom of multiple neuropsychiatric disorders and often lacks effective treatments. Reward circuitry regions including the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and anterior cingulate have been implicated in risk-taking by neuroimaging studies. Electrophysiological activity associated with risk taking in these regions is not well understood in humans. Further characterizing the neural signalling that underlies risk-taking may provide therapeutic insight into disorders associated with risk-taking...

UNLABELLED: Across all electrical stimulation (neuromodulation) domains, conventional analysis of cell polarization involves two discrete steps: i) prediction of macroscopic electric field, ignoring presence of cells and; ii) prediction of cell polarization from tissue electric fields. The first step assumes that electric current flow is not distorted by the dense tortuous network of cell structures. The deficiencies of this assumption have long been recognized, but - except for trivial geometries - ignored, because it presented intractable computation hurdles...

Two neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are the accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) proteins and alterations in cortical neurophysiological signaling. Despite parallel research indicating disruption of multiple neurotransmitter systems in AD, it has been unclear whether these two phenomena are related to the neurochemical organization of the cortex. We leveraged task-free magnetoencephalography and positron emission tomography, with a cortical atlas of 19 neurotransmitters to study the alignment and interactions between alterations of neurophysiological signaling, Aβ deposition, and the neurochemical gradients of the human cortex...

Social buffering is the phenomenon in which the presence of an affiliative conspecific mitigates stress responses. We previously demonstrated that social buffering completely ameliorates conditioned fear responses in rats. However, the neuromodulators involved in social buffering are poorly understood. Given that opioids, dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin play an important role in affiliative behaviour, here, we assessed the effects of the most well-known antagonists, naloxone (opioid receptor antagonist), haloperidol (dopamine D2 receptor antagonist), atosiban (oxytocin receptor antagonist) and SR49059 (vasopressin V1a receptor antagonist), on social buffering...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: The European Association of Urology (EAU) Guidelines Panel on non-neurogenic male lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) aimed to develop a new subchapter on underactive bladder (UAB) in non-neurogenic men to inform health care providers of current best evidence and practice. Here, we present a summary of the UAB subchapter that is incorporated into the 2024 version of the EAU guidelines on non-neurogenic male LUTS. METHODS: A systematic literature search was conducted from 2002 to 2022, and articles with the highest certainty evidence were selected...

OBJECTIVE: Electroencephalography (EEG) can highlight significant changes in spontaneous electrical activity of the brain produced by altered brain network connectivity linked to inflammatory demyelinating lesions and neuronal loss occurring in multiple sclerosis (MS). In this review, we describe the main EEG findings reported in the literature to characterize motor network alteration in term of local activity or functional connectivity changes in patients with MS (pwMS). METHODS: A comprehensive literature search was conducted to include articles with quantitative analyses of resting-state EEG recordings (spectrograms or advanced methods for assessing spatial and temporal dynamics, such as coherence, theory of graphs, recurrent quantification, microstates) or dynamic EEG recordings during a motor task, with or without connectivity analyses...

INTRODUCTION: For patients with drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) who are not suitable for surgical resection, neuromodulation with vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is an established approach. However, there is limited evidence of seizure reduction when replacing traditional VNS (tVNS) device with a cardiac-based one (cbVNS). This meta-analysis compares the seizure reduction achieved by replacing tVNS with cbVNS in a population with DRE. METHODS: We systematically searched PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Central following PRISMA guidelines...

Drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) poses significant challenges in terms of effective management and seizure control. Neuromodulation techniques have emerged as promising solutions for individuals who are unresponsive to pharmacological treatments, especially for those who are not good surgical candidates for surgical resection or laser interstitial therapy (LiTT). Currently, there are three neuromodulation techniques that are FDA-approved for the management of DRE. These include vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), deep brain stimulation (DBS), and responsive neurostimulation (RNS)...

INTRODUCTION: Neurological defects in children with cerebral palsy (CP) not only affect their motor skills but also lead to bladder and bowel problems. Although most children with CP have achieved urinary control, more than 50% of cases experience lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS). Common LUTS complaints observed in CP include delayed toilet training, urinary incontinence, increased frequency of urination, urgency, urinary hesitancy, and recurrent urinary tract infections. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to prospectively evaluate and compare the effectiveness of two different physiotherapy approaches, sacral Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) and massage, on lower urinary tract dysfunction in children with CP...

The behavioral and neural effects of the endogenous release of acetylcholine following stimulation of the Nucleus Basalis of Meynert (NB) have been recently examined in two male monkeys (Qi et al. 2021). Counterintuitively, NB stimulation enhanced behavioral performance while broadening neural tuning in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The mechanism by which a weaker mnemonic neural code could lead to better performance remains unclear. Here, we show that increased neural excitability in a simple continuous bump attractor model can induce broader neural tuning and decrease bump diffusion, provided neural rates are saturated...

One cannot survive without regularly urinating and defecating. People with neurological injury (spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, stroke) or disease (multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, spina bifida) and many elderly are unable to voluntarily initiate voiding. The great majority of them require bladder catheters to void urine and "manual bowel programs" with digital rectal stimulation and manual extraction to void stool. Catheter-associated urinary tract infections frequently require hospitalization, while manual bowel programs are time-consuming (1-2 hours), stigmatizing, and cause rectal pain and discomfort...

BACKGROUND: Amotivation is a typical feature in major depressive disorder (MDD), which produces reduced willingness to exert effort. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is a crucial structure in goal-directed actions and therefore is a potential target in modulating effortful motivation. However, it remains unclear whether the intervention is effective for patients with MDD. METHODS: We employed transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), computational modelling and event-related potentials (ERPs) to reveal the causal relationship between the left DLPFC and motivation for effortful rewards in MDD...

Existing methods for studying neural circuits and treating neurological disorders are typically based on physical and chemical cues to manipulate and record neural activities. These approaches often involve predefined, rigid, and unchangeable signal patterns, which cannot be adjusted in real time according to the patient's condition or neural activities. With the continuous development of neural interfaces, conducting in vivo research on adaptive and modifiable treatments for neurological diseases and neural circuits is now possible...

OBJECTIVE: Transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) is being explored for neuroscience research and clinical applications due to its ability to affect precise brain regions noninvasively. The ability to target specific brain regions and localize the beam during these procedures is important for these applications to avoid damage and minimize off-target effects. Here, we present a method to combine optical tracking with magnetic resonance (MR) acoustic radiation force imaging to achieve targeting and localizing of the tFUS beam...

The ability to measure dynamic changes in neurochemicals with high spatiotemporal resolution is essential for understanding the diverse range of functions mediated by the brain. We review recent advances in genetically encoded sensors for detecting neurochemicals and discuss their in vivo applications. For example, notable progress has been made with respect to sensors for second messengers such as cyclic adenosine monophosphate, enabling in vivo real-time monitoring of these messengers at single-cell and even subcellular resolution...