The glucose metabolism in the mediodorsal thalamus (MD) is increased in rats in the activity-based anorexia (ABA) model. In patients, electrical stimulation in hyperactive brain regions reduced symptoms in e.g. major depressive disorder and cluster headache. In two blinded randomised controlled experiments, we therefore examined the effects of high-frequency electrical stimulation and an electr...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a safe, effective, and reversible treatment for a number of movement disorders. This has prompted investigation of its use for other applications including psychiatric disorders. In recent years, DBS has been introduced for the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which is characterized by recurrent unwanted thoughts or ideas (obsessions)...

Orexin A is produced in caudal lateral, posterior, perifornical, and dorsomedial hypothalamic areas. Orexin A in the rostro-dorsal lateral hypothalamic area (rLHa) stimulates feeding and activates several feeding-regulatory brain areas. We hypothesized that aging diminishes feeding and c-Fos-immunoreactivity (c-Fos-ir; marker of neuronal activation) response to orexin A. Young (3 mo), middle-ag...

introduction: the septal region is part of the telencephalon and is a component of the limbic system. the lateral septal area (ls); largest nuclear mass in this region, plays a pivotal role in various physiological processes, such as aggression, emotion, thermoregulation, water and food intake and sexual behaviour. to support the functional analysis of this brain area in the rat, the sources of...

Both acupuncture and imagery have shown potential for chronic pain management. However, the mechanisms underlying their analgesic effects remain unclear. This study aims to explore thalamocortical video-guided treatment (VGAIT), a combination of guided imagery, using resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) three thalamic subdivisions—the ventral posterolateral thalamus (VPL), mediodorsal (...

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and mediodorsal thalamus (MD) together form a thalamocortical circuit that has been implicated in the learning and production of goal-directed actions. In this study we measured neural activity in both regions simultaneously, as rats learned to press a lever to earn food rewards. In both MD and mPFC, instrumental learning was accompanied by dramatic changes i...

The mediodorsal thalamic nucleus (MD) receives convergent inputs from subcortical limbic structures that overlap with a dopaminergic (DA) innervation. In this study, we describe the effects of DA agonists on the basal and evoked electrophysiological activity of identified thalamic cells of rats recorded in vitro. Administration of the D1 agonist SFK 38393 (10 microM) did not produce a clear eff...

The pathogenesis underlying the typical findings in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) such as periodic EEG changes or myoclonus is not fully understood. The thalamus possesses a high density of inhibitory neurones and serves as a crucial pacemaker of rhythmic EEG activity. As inhibitory neurones expressing parvalbumin (PV) are reduced in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus in sporadic CJD (sCJD),...