Sleep is required for, and sleep loss impairs, normal hippocampal synaptic N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptor function and expression, hippocampal NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity, and hippocampal-dependent memory function. Although sleep is essential, the signals linking sleep to hippocampal function are not known. One potential signal is growth hormone. Growth hormone i...

Using 24 h of total sleep deprivation to perturb normal cognitive function, we conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study to evaluate the effect of the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, donepezil, on behavioral performance and task-related brain activation in 28 healthy, young, adult volunteers. The behavioral tasks involved the parametric manipulation of visual short-term memor...

This paper provides a step-by-step account of how fuzzy measures of monetary poverty and nonmonetary deprivation may be constructed based on survey data such as from EU-SILC. For non-monetary deprivation, meaning dimensions or groupings of initial items of deprivation are identified using explanatory and confirmatory factor analyses, and a weighting system is applied for the aggregation individ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To examine geographical variation in limiting long-term illness in England and Wales and assesses the extent of its similarity with the distribution of mortality rates and of deprivation. DESIGN A geographically based study using data from the 1991 census on limiting long term illness. Maps and regression analysis are used to compare the distribution of standardised illness ra...

An important unresolved question in sensory neuroscience is whether, and if so with what time course, tactile perception is enhanced by visual deprivation. In three experiments involving 158 normally sighted human participants, we assessed whether tactile spatial acuity improves with short-term visual deprivation over periods ranging from under 10 to over 110 minutes. We used an automated, prec...

Several studies have suggested that neuroplasticity can be triggered by short-term visual deprivation in healthy adults. Specifically, these studies have provided evidence that visual deprivation reversibly affects basic perceptual abilities. The present study investigated the long-lasting effects of short-term visual deprivation on emotion perception. To this aim, we visually deprived a group ...

Neonatal pain and stress induce long-term changes in pain sensitivity. Therefore their interrelation is a topical subject of clinical and basic research. The present study investigated the effects of inflammatory peripheral pain and stress of maternal deprivation (MD)-isolation in 1-2- and 7-8-day-old Wistar rats (P1,2 and P7,8 respectively, ages comparable to preterm and full-term human babies...

Sleep clearly influences learning and memory since sleep deprivation and stress impairs both cognitive processes. Working memory is an essential cognitive process and refers to a short-term holding of incoming information required to update the long-term mnemonic storage and to manipulate new elements in order to solve problems and make decisions. Nevertheless, the influence of sleep deprivatio...

The lack of sufficient amounts of sleep is a hallmark of modern living, and it is commonly perceived that in the long run this makes us sick. An increasing amount of scientific data indicate that sleep deprivation has detrimental effects on immune function. Conversely, immune responses feedback on sleep phase and architecture. Several studies have investigated the impact of short-term sleep dep...

Sleep loss can alter extrinsic, task-related functional MRI signals involved in attention, memory, and executive function. However, the effects of sleep loss on brain structure have not been well characterized. Recent studies with patients with sleep disorders and animal models have demonstrated reduction of regional brain structure in the hippocampus and thalamus. In this study, using T1-weigh...