High-Tech Personalized Healthcare in Movement Disorders


Book Description

The management of movement disorders is undergoing rapid transformation through the use of innovative health technologies, such as wearable sensors, mobile apps, robotics, and telemedicine systems. These technologies continue to evolve, providing new solutions for early diagnosis, remote monitoring, tailored treatments, and enhanced rehabilitative strategies that cater to individual needs through personalized approaches. With the aid of new health technologies, motor abnormalities can be sensitively recognized and objectively assessed, providing quantifiable measures to detect subtle changes associated with treatment response and disease progression. Moreover, long-term instrumental monitoring offers the opportunity for improving therapeutic strategies by gathering ecological data directly at patients’ homes in free-living situations.




Neuroscience in the 21st Century


Book Description

Edited and authored by a wealth of international experts in neuroscience and related disciplines, this key new resource aims to offer medical students and graduate researchers around the world a comprehensive introduction and overview of modern neuroscience. Neuroscience research is certain to prove a vital element in combating mental illness in its various incarnations, a strategic battleground in the future of medicine, as the prevalence of mental disorders is becoming better understood each year. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are affected by mental, behavioral, neurological and substance use disorders. The World Health Organization estimated in 2002 that 154 million people globally suffer from depression and 25 million people from schizophrenia; 91 million people are affected by alcohol use disorders and 15 million by drug use disorders. A more recent WHO report shows that 50 million people suffer from epilepsy and 24 million from Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Because neuroscience takes the etiology of disease—the complex interplay between biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors—as its object of inquiry, it is increasingly valuable in understanding an array of medical conditions. A recent report by the United States’ Surgeon General cites several such diseases: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, early-onset depression, autism, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, anorexia nervosa, and panic disorder, among many others. Not only is this volume a boon to those wishing to understand the future of neuroscience, it also aims to encourage the initiation of neuroscience programs in developing countries, featuring as it does an appendix full of advice on how to develop such programs. With broad coverage of both basic science and clinical issues, comprising around 150 chapters from a diversity of international authors and including complementary video components, Neuroscience in the 21st Century in its second edition serves as a comprehensive resource to students and researchers alike.




The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience


Book Description

This handbook introduces the reader to the thought-provoking research on the neural foundations of human intelligence. Written for undergraduate or graduate students, practitioners, and researchers in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and related fields, the chapters summarize research emerging from the rapidly developing neuroscience literature on human intelligence. The volume focusses on theoretical innovation and recent advances in the measurement, modelling, and characterization of the neurobiology of intelligence differences, especially from brain imaging studies. It summarizes fundamental issues in the characterization and measurement of general intelligence, and surveys multidisciplinary research consortia and large-scale data repositories for the study of general intelligence. A systematic review of neuroimaging methods for studying intelligence is provided, including structural and diffusion-weighted MRI techniques, functional MRI methods, and spectroscopic imaging of metabolic markers of intelligence.




Cognitive Changes and the Aging Brain


Book Description

This book describes the changes in the brain and in cognitive functions that occur with aging in the absence of a neurological, psychiatric, or medical disease. It discusses aging-related changes in many brain functions, including memory, language, sensory perception, motor function, creativity, attention, executive functions, emotions and mood. The neural mechanisms that may account for specific aging-related changes in cognition, perception and behavior are explored, as well as the means by which aging-related cognitive decrements can be managed and possibly ameliorated. Consequently, this book will be of value to clinicians, including neurologists, psychiatrists, geriatricians, primary care physicians, psychologists and speech-language pathologists. In addition, researchers and graduate students who want to learn about the aging brain will find this an indispensable guide.




Drosophila Models for Human Diseases


Book Description

Most biological pathways, physical and neurological properties are highly conserved between humans and Drosophila and nearly 75% of human disease-causing genes have a functional homologue in Drosophila. This volume provides recent advances in Drosophila models for various human diseases, with each chapter providing a review of studies involving Drosophila models, as well as detailed protocols commonly used in laboratories. Starting with a review of Drosophila’s value as a highly tractable model organism for studying human diseases, subsequent chapters present Drosophila models for specific human diseases. The book provides a useful resource for all scientists who are starting to use the Drosophila model in their studies, and for researchers working in the pharmaceutical industry and using new screening models to develop new medicines for various diseases.




Visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN): a Prediction Error Signal in the Visual Modality


Book Description

Current theories of visual change detection emphasize the importance of conscious attention to detect unexpected changes in the visual environment. However, an increasing body of studies shows that the human brain is capable of detecting even small visual changes, especially if such changes violate non-conscious probabilistic expectations based on repeating experiences. In other words, our brain automatically represents statistical regularities of our visual environmental. Since the discovery of the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential (ERP) component, the majority of research in the field has focused on auditory deviance detection. Such automatic change detection mechanisms operate in the visual modality too, as indicated by the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) brain potential to rare changes. VMMN is typically elicited by stimuli with infrequent (deviant) features embedded in a stream of frequent (standard) stimuli, outside the focus of attention. In this research topic we aim to present vMMN as a prediction error signal. Predictive coding theories account for phenomena such as mismatch negativity and repetition suppression, and place them in a broader context of a general theory of cortical responses. A wide range of vMMN studies has been presented in this Research Topic. Twelve articles address roughly four general sub-themes including attention, language, face processing, and psychiatric disorders. Additionally, four articles focused on particular subjects such as the oblique effect, object formation, and development and time-frequency analysis of vMMN. Furthermore, a review paper presented vMMN in a hierarchical predictive coding framework. Each paper in this Research Topic is a valuable contribution to the field of automatic visual change detection and deepens our understanding of the short term plasticity underlying predictive processes of visual perceptual learning.




Neuro-Education and Neuro-Rehabilitation


Book Description

In the last decade, important discoveries have been made in cognitive neuroscience regarding brain plasticity and learning such as the mirror neurons system and the anatomo-functional organization of perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities.... Time has come to consider the societal impact of these findings. The aim of this Research Topic of Frontiers in Psychology is to concentrate on two domains: neuro-education and neuro-rehabilitation. At the interface between neuroscience, psychology and education, neuro-education is a new inter-disciplinary emerging field that aims at developing new education programs based on results from cognitive neuroscience and psychology. For instance, brain-based learning methods are flourishing but few have been rigorously tested using well-controlled procedures. Authors of this Research Topic will present their latest findings in this domain using rigorously controlled experiments. Neuro-rehabilitation aims at developing new rehabilitation methods for children and adults with learning disorders. Neuro-rehabilitation programs can be based upon a relatively low number of patients and controls or on large clinical trials to test for the efficiency of new treatments. These projects may also aim at testing the efficiency of video-games and of new methods such as Trans Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) for therapeutic interventions in children or adolescents with learning disabilities. This Research Topic will bring together neuroscientists interested in brain plasticity and the effects of training, psychologists working with adults as well as with normally developing children and children with learning disabilities as well as education researchers directly confronted with the efficiency of education programs. The goal for each author is to describe the state of the art in his/her specific research domain and to illustrate how her/his research findings can impact education in the classroom or rehabilitation of children and adolescents with learning disorders.




Good Research Practice in Non-Clinical Pharmacology and Biomedicine


Book Description

This open access book, published under a CC BY 4.0 license in the Pubmed indexed book series Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, provides up-to-date information on best practice to improve experimental design and quality of research in non-clinical pharmacology and biomedicine.




Leucine-Rich Repeat Kinase 2 (LRRK2)


Book Description

This is the first book to assemble the leading researchers in the field of LRRK2 biology and neurology and provide a snapshot of the current state of knowledge, encompassing all major aspects of its function and dysfunction. The contributors are experts in cell biology and physiology, neurobiology, and medicinal chemistry, bringing a multidisciplinary perspective on the gene and its role in disease. The book covers the identification of LRRK2 as a major contributor to the pathogenesis of Parkinson's Disease. It also discusses the current state of the field after a decade of research, putative normal physiological roles of LRRK2, and the various pathways that have been identified in the search for the mechanism(s) of its induction of neurodegeneration.