Although visceral hypersensitivity is thought to be important in generating symptoms in functional gastrointestinal disorders, the neural mechanisms involved are poorly understood. We recently showed that central sensitization (hyperexcitability of spinal cord sensory neurones) may play an important role. In this study, we demonstrate that after a 30-min infusion of 0.15 M HCl acid into the hea...

Attentional biases to threat are considered central to anxiety disorders, however physiological evidence of their nature and time course is lacking. Event-related potentials (ERPs) characterized sensory and cognitive changes while 20 outpatients with panic disorder (PD), 20 with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and 20 healthy controls (HCs) responded to the color (emotional Stroop task) or ...

Event-related potentials (ERP) following emotive words were investigated in 22 healthy subjects with high (HD) or low (LD) depressive scores. The ERP was recorded following a visual presentation of emotive adjectives. The adjectives presented included words that subjects felt to be fit or unfit to their own character or traits, and that they perceived as positive or negative. The latency of P30...

This report describes a patient whose ability to understand speech had so deteriorated over 20 years time that she was being considered for a cochlear implant, despite the fact that pure-tone sensitivity loss had not deteriorated proportionately. An unusual combination of otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) and auditory evoked potential (AEP) results are described. Click-evoked and distortion product ...

While everyone has experienced that seeing lip movements may improve speech perception, little is known about the neural mechanisms by which audiovisual speech information is combined. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects performed an auditory recognition task among four different natural syllables randomly presented in the auditory (A), visual (V) or congruent bimodal (...

Auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) and behavioral tests were used to evaluate auditory processing in 10 children aged 7 to 11 years who were diagnosed as learning disabled (LD). AEPs included auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), middle latency responses (MLRs), and late cortical responses (P1, N1, P2, P3). Late cortical responses were recorded using an active listening oddball procedure. Auditor...

Painful stimuli delivered by infrared laser stimulators elicit laser-evoked potentials (LEP) or magnetic fields in respective electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG). Evidence is reviewed that LEP represent a series of event-related potentials (ERP) that depend on vigilance and arousal, selective spatial attention and contextual task variables. Paradigms adopted from other sti...

OBJECTIVE Older adults often have trouble adjusting to hearing aids when they start wearing them for the first time. Probe microphone measurements verify appropriate levels of amplification up to the tympanic membrane. Little is known, however, about the effects of amplification on auditory-evoked responses to speech stimuli during initial hearing aid use. The present study assesses the effects...

RATIONALE The serotonergic and cholinergic systems are jointly involved in regulating sleep but this system is theorized to be disturbed in depressed individuals. We previously reported that cholinergic and serotonergic agents induce sleep changes partially consistent with monoamine models of sleep disturbances in depression. One potential cause of disturbed neurotransmission is genetic predisp...