Exposure to cocaine in utero results in behavioral and neurodevelopmental abnormalities that persist into adulthood. Conventional MR imaging has generally failed to reveal the expected structural lesions to explain these clinical findings. We report a case of focal MR imaging signal-intensity changes in the substantia nigra, locus ceruleus, and other selected nerve tracts and nuclei in a child ...

Three Japanese patients with Joseph disease from different families developed sleep disturbance, followed by delirium at the middle to end stage. Brain CT scans of the three patients showed brainstem tegmental atrophy. EEG revealed slowing of background activity. Two necropsy cases showed degeneration of the reticular formation, raphe nuclei and locus ceruleus in the brainstem tegmentum in addi...

We previously found that beta adrenergic agonists such as norepinephrine and isoproterenol potentiate the depressant actions of ethanol (EtOH) on cerebellar Purkinje neurons. Furthermore, antagonism of the beta adrenergic effects of endogenously released catecholamines with timolol reduced EtOH-induced depressions of neuronal activity in that brain area. In the present study, we further investi...

BACKGROUND Environmental toxins are suspected to play a role in the pathogenesis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In an attempt to determine which pathways these toxins can use to enter motor neurons we compared the distribution of mercury in the CNS of a human and of mice that had been exposed to inorganic mercury. RESULTS In the human who had been exposed to metallic mercury, mercury...

Single unit recording has been used as a well-known technique to study the electrical behavior of neurons. In this respect, the classical methods are rather expensive. In this study a simple and inexpensive method for single unit recording studies has been introduced. Computer sound card was used for data acquisition. Neural responses were saved via simple sound applicable packages and then ana...

Electrotonic coupling synchronizes the spontaneous firing of locus ceruleus (LC) neurons in the neonatal rat brain, whereas in adults, synchronous activity is rare. This report examines the role of action potential frequency on synchronous activity in the adult LC. Decreasing the firing frequency in slices from adult animals facilitated the appearance of subthreshold oscillations and increased ...