Detection of Threshold-Level Stimuli Modulated by Temporal Predictions of the Cerebellum.

The cerebellum has the reputation of being a primitive part of the brain that mostly is involved in motor coordination and motor control. Older lesion studies and more recent electrophysiological studies have, however, indicated that it is involved in temporal perception and temporal expectation building. An outstanding question is whether this temporal expectation building cerebellar activity has functional relevance. In this study, we collected magnetoencephalographic data from 30 healthy participants performing a detection task on at-threshold stimulation that was presented at the end of a sequence of temporally regular or irregular above-threshold stimulation. We found that behavioral detection rates depended on the degree of irregularity in the sequence preceding it. We also found cerebellar responses evoked by above-threshold and at-threshold stimulation. The evoked responses to at-threshold stimulation differed significantly, depending on whether it was preceded by a regular or an irregular sequence. Finally, we found that detection performance across participants correlated significantly with the differences in cerebellar evoked responses to the at-threshold stimulation, demonstrating the functional relevance of cerebellar activity in sensory expectation building. We furthermore found evidence of thalamic involvement, as indicated by responses in the beta band (14-30 Hz) and by significant modulations of cerebello-thalamic connectivity by the regularity of the sequence and the kind of stimulation terminating the sequence. These results provide evidence that the temporal expectation building mechanism of the cerebellum, what we and others have called an internal clock, shows functional relevance by regulating behavior and performance in sensory action that requires acting and integrating evidence over precise timescales.

Identifying content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness.

Some conscious experiences are more vivid than others. Although perceptual vividness is a key component of human consciousness, how variation in this magnitude property is registered by the human brain is unknown. A striking feature of neural codes for magnitude in other psychological domains, such as number or reward, is that the magnitude property is represented independently of its sensory features. To test whether perceptual vividness also covaries with neural codes that are invariant to sensory content, we reanalyzed existing magnetoencephalography and functional MRI data from two distinct studies which quantified perceptual vividness via subjective ratings of awareness and visibility. Using representational similarity and decoding analyses, we find evidence for content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness distributed across visual, parietal, and frontal cortices. Our findings indicate that the neural correlates of subjective vividness may share similar properties to magnitude codes in other cognitive domains.

Preventing Teen Pregnancy: A Qualitative Study of the Perspectives of Parenting and Expecting Latino Adolescents.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: Latino youths in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of teen pregnancy. The aim of this study was to obtain expecting and parenting Latino adolescents' perspectives regarding factors contributing to teen pregnancy and pregnancy prevention. METHODS: Expecting/parenting Latino adolescents were recruited from high schools with high proportions of Latino youths and teen pregnancy. Participants completed a questionnaire on sociodemographic and background characteristics. Focus groups were stratified by age and gender and audio recorded. Grounded theory was used to identify themes from the transcribed audio recordings. RESULTS: Thirty-two expecting/parenting Latino adolescents (20 females, 12 males) 14-19 years old participated in four focus groups. Quantitative results revealed that two-thirds of participants at birth had adolescent mothers. Over three-quarters of participants reported that their pregnancies had occurred too soon. Qualitative themes for factors contributing to teen pregnancy included lack of contraceptive knowledge/access, belief of invincibility, influence within relationships, male decisions on contraceptive use, desire to belong among peers, lack of parental support for contraceptive use, lack of parental attention, rebellion, normalization of adolescent parenthood in Latino culture, and media. Themes for pregnancy prevention included time alone with physicians, parenting teens as mentors, reproductive health education, and community pregnancy-prevention programs. CONCLUSION: Multiple factors contribute to teen pregnancy in Latino youth, including influences from Latino culture, family, peers, partners, and social determinants of health. Pregnancy prevention should incorporate interventions to address these aspects, including disseminating culturally sensitive education materials, providing parenting teens as peer mentors, encouraging time alone with health care providers, and addressing various social determinants of health.

Observational study on the neonatal outcome during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.

AIM: We aimed to determine stillbirth, preterm birth, perinatal complications, and the developmental outcome of children born preterm during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. METHODS: National data from the perinatal survey of preterm and term infants born in 2017-2020 between 22 March and 31 December were evaluated. Neurodevelopment of preterm infants at 2 years corrected age was tested with the Parent Report of Children's Abilities-Revised questionnaire and by clinical testing with Bayley scales, either before or during the COVID-19 pandemic. Statistical significance was calculated using a Pearson's chi-square-independence test and a linear regression model. RESULTS: In 2020, there was an increase of stillbirths of 0.02% (p = 0.01) and a decrease in preterm births by 0.38% (p < 0.001). No changes were found in a representative subgroup of infants with regard to neurodevelopmental scores (mental developmental index and psychomotor developmental index) or in parent survey data (non-verbal cognition scale and language development scale). CONCLUSION: Increasing rates of stillbirths and decreasing preterm births in Germany were observed. Existing networks might stabilise neurodevelopment of preterm infants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gas permeation rates of ultrathin graphite sealed SiO2 cavities.

Despite the proven impermeability of graphene toward most standard gases, graphene/graphite sealed SiO2 cavities always exhibit a nonzero leak rate, and the physical leakage mechanism is still unclear. By measuring leak rates of different gases for the same cavities sealed by ultrathin graphite under identical conditions, we find that the leak rates generally depend on the kinetic diameter of the gas molecules, which implies that the leakage is caused by a molecular sieving mechanism. By comparing different samples, we find that the leak rate of any gas in a particular sample is well predicted by the leak rate of N2 in that sample. In addition, we observe enhanced leak rates of water-soluble molecules. We infer that the leakage path (i.e., the graphene/graphite-SiO2 interface) favors hydrophilic species.

Task requirements affect the neural correlates of consciousness.

In the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, it is often assumed that there is a stable set within the relevant sensory modality. Within the visual modality, the debate has centred upon whether frontal or occipital activations are the best predictors of perceptual awareness. Although not accepted by all as definitive evidence, no-report and decoding studies have indicated that occipital activity is the most consistently correlated with perceptual awareness whereas frontal activity might be closely related to aspects of cognition typically related to reports. However, perception is rarely just passive perception of something, but more or less always perception for something. That is, the task at hand for the perceiver may influence what is being perceived. This suggests an alternative view: that consciousness is not one specific 'function' that can be localized consistently to one area or event-related component and that the specific attributes of the neural correlates of consciousness depend on the task at hand. To investigate whether and how tasks may influence the neural correlates of consciousness, we here contrasted two tasks, a perceptual task and a conceptual task, using identical stimuli in both tasks. Using magnetoencephalography, we found that the perceptual task recruited more occipital resources than the conceptual task. Furthermore, we found that between the two conditions, the amount of frontal resources recruited differed between different gradations of perceptual awareness partly in an unexpected manner. These findings support a view of task affecting the neural correlates of consciousness.

Wilson Sims Fall Risk Assessment Tool Versus Morse Fall Scale in Psychogeriatric Inpatients: a Multicentre Study.

OBJECTIVE: To compare predictive validity of the Wilson Sims Fall Risk Assessment Tool (WSFRAT) with that of the Morse Fall Scale (MFS) in psychogeriatric inpatients. METHODS: Psychogeriatric patients from Shatin Hospital, Tai Po Hospital, Castle Peak Hospital, and United Christian Hospital who had fall incident between April 2019 and April 2020 were identified. Their fall risks were assessed by the WSFRAT and the MFS, and their falls incidents during hospitalisation were recorded. Patients were classified as having high fall risk when their MFS score was ≥45 and when their WSFRAT score was ≥7. Sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of the two scales were calculated. RESULTS: We identified 183 (90 male and 93 female) psychogeriatric patients aged ≥65 years who had fall incident and were assessed by both the WSFRAT and the MFS during the study period. Among the 183 patients, four sustained a fall during hospital stay, giving a prevalence of 2.19%. All four patients were classified as having high risk of fall by WSFRAT, but only two of them were classified so by MFS. The sensitivity of WSFRAT was 100%, which was higher than the 50% by MFS, but specificity of MFS was higher than that of WSFRAT (45.81% vs 54.75%). CONCLUSION: WSFRAT is a better fall risk assessment scale for psychiatric inpatients than MFS, because of higher sensitivity (100% vs 50%). It has items specific to psychiatric patients and should replace MFS in psychiatric settings.

The cerebellar clock: Predicting and timing somatosensory touch.

The cerebellum is involved in predicting the sensory feedback resulting from movements and sensations, but little is known about the precise timing of these predictions due to the scarcity of time-sensitive cerebellar neuroimaging studies. We here, using magnetoencephalography, investigated the hypothesis that one function of the cerebellum is to predict with millisecond precision when rhythmic stimuli are expected to impinge on sensory receptors. This revealed that omissions following regular trains of stimulation showed higher cerebellar power in the beta band (14-30 Hz) than those following irregular trains of stimulation, within milliseconds of when the omitted stimulus should have appeared. We also found evidence of cerebellar theta band (4-7 Hz) activity encoding the rhythm of new sequences of stimulation. Our results also strongly suggest that the putamen and the thalamus mirror the cerebellum in showing higher beta band power when omissions followed regular trains of stimulation compared to when they followed irregular trains of stimulation. We interpret this as the cerebellum functioning as a clock that precisely encodes and predicts upcoming stimulation, perhaps in tandem with the putamen and thalamus. Relative to less predictable stimuli, perfectly predictable stimuli induce greater cerebellar power. This implies that the cerebellum entrains to rhythmic stimuli for the purpose of detecting any deviations from that rhythm.

Gender-affirming hormone therapy in cystic fibrosis - A case of new Pseudomonas infection.

BACKGROUND: Little is known about the impact of hormone therapy on transgender youth with Cystic Fibrosis (CF). This case report describes an 18-year-old affirmed female with CF who was treated with hormone therapy associated in timing with new growth of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in her sputum culture. DISCUSSION: We highlight important considerations, including the impact of gender-affirming hormone therapy on overall CF disease course. Evidence supports that females with CF have worse outcomes than males, which are partly attributed to estrogen effects. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of the most prevalent pathogens in people with CF. Here, we highlight a transfemale who grows Pseudomonas aeruginosa for the first time since her youth, nearly 1 year after starting estrogen therapy. This is consistent with previous literature of an association between high estrogen levels and Pseudomonas aeruginosa prevalence, but has never been evaluated in a transgender population. CONCLUSION: Through this case, we demonstrate the need for additional research to understand the relationship between gender-affirmative hormone transition and CF care and management.

The Influence of Form- and Meaning-Based Predictions on Cortical Speech Processing Under Challenging Listening Conditions: A MEG Study.

Under adverse listening conditions, prior linguistic knowledge about the form (i.e., phonology) and meaning (i.e., semantics) help us to predict what an interlocutor is about to say. Previous research has shown that accurate predictions of incoming speech increase speech intelligibility, and that semantic predictions enhance the perceptual clarity of degraded speech even when exact phonological predictions are possible. In addition, working memory (WM) is thought to have specific influence over anticipatory mechanisms by actively maintaining and updating the relevance of predicted vs. unpredicted speech inputs. However, the relative impact on speech processing of deviations from expectations related to form and meaning is incompletely understood. Here, we use MEG to investigate the cortical temporal processing of deviations from the expected form and meaning of final words during sentence processing. Our overall aim was to observe how deviations from the expected form and meaning modulate cortical speech processing under adverse listening conditions and investigate the degree to which this is associated with WM capacity. Results indicated that different types of deviations are processed differently in the auditory N400 and Mismatch Negativity (MMN) components. In particular, MMN was sensitive to the type of deviation (form or meaning) whereas the N400 was sensitive to the magnitude of the deviation rather than its type. WM capacity was associated with the ability to process phonological incoming information and semantic integration.

Evaluation of the effectiveness of the Family Nurse Partnership home visiting programme in first time young mothers in Scotland: a protocol for a natural experiment.

INTRODUCTION: Individual, social and economic circumstances faced by young mothers (19 years or under) can challenge a successful start in life for their children. Intervening early might enhance life chances for both mother and child. The Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) is an intensive nurse-led home visiting programme developed in the US which aims to improve prenatal health behaviours, birth outcomes, child development and health outcomes, and maternal life course. Establishing evidence of effectiveness beyond the original US setting is important to understand where further adaptation is required within a country specific context. OBJECTIVE: This study will form one strand of the Scottish Government's plan to evaluate the effectiveness of FNP as compared to usual care for mothers and their children in Scotland and will focus only on outcomes that can be identified using routine administrative data systems. METHODS: This study is a natural experiment with a case-cohort design using linked anonymised routine health, educational and social care data. Cases will be women enrolled as FNP Clients in ten NHS Health Boards in Scotland and Controls will be women who met FNP eligibility criteria but were pregnant at a time when the programme was not recruiting. Outcomes are mapped to the Scottish FNP logic model. All comparative analyses will be pre-specified, conducted on an intention to treat basis and will use multilevel regression models to compare outcomes between groups. DISCUSSION: The study protocol is based upon the specification of FNP commissioned by the Scottish Government. This study design is novel for the evaluation of the FNP/NFP programmes which are primarily evaluated with an RCT. Outcomes included within the study have been selected on the basis that they are outcomes FNP aims to influence and where there is routine data available to assess the outcome.

On-scalp MEG SQUIDs are sensitive to early somatosensory activity unseen by conventional MEG.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) has a unique capacity to resolve the spatio-temporal development of brain activity from non-invasive measurements. Conventional MEG, however, relies on sensors that sample from a distance (20-40 â€‹mm) to the head due to thermal insulation requirements (the MEG sensors function at 4 â€‹K in a helmet). A gain in signal strength and spatial resolution may be achieved if sensors are moved closer to the head. Here, we report a study comparing measurements from a seven-channel on-scalp SQUID MEG system to those from a conventional (in-helmet) SQUID MEG system. We compared the spatio-temporal resolution between on-scalp and conventional MEG by comparing the discrimination accuracy for neural activity patterns resulting from stimulating five different phalanges of the right hand. Because of proximity and sensor density differences between on-scalp and conventional MEG, we hypothesized that on-scalp MEG would allow for a more high-resolved assessment of these activity patterns, and therefore also a better classification performance in discriminating between neural activations from the different phalanges. We observed that on-scalp MEG provided better classification performance during an early post-stimulus period (10-20 â€‹ms). This corresponded to the electroencephalographic (EEG) component P16/N16 and was an unexpected observation as this component is usually not observed in conventional MEG. This finding shows that on-scalp MEG enables a richer registration of the cortical signal, indicating a sensitivity to what are potentially sources in the thalamo-cortical radiation. We had originally expected that on-scalp MEG would provide better classification accuracy based on activity in proximity to the P60m component compared to conventional MEG. This component indeed allowed for the best classification performance for both MEG systems (60-75%, chance 50%). However, we did not find that on-scalp MEG allowed for better classification than conventional MEG at this latency. We suggest that this absence of differences is due to the limited sensor coverage in the recording, in combination with our strategy for positioning the on-scalp MEG sensors. We show how the current sensor coverage may have limited our chances to register the necessary between-phalange source field dissimilarities for fair hypothesis testing, an approach we otherwise believe to be useful for future benchmarking measurements.

Detection of interictal epileptiform discharges: A comparison of on-scalp MEG and conventional MEG measurements.

OBJECTIVE: Conventional MEG provides an unsurpassed ability to, non-invasively, detect epileptic activity. However, highly resolved information on small neuronal populations required in epilepsy diagnostics is lost and can be detected only intracranially. Next-generation on-scalp magnetencephalography (MEG) sensors aim to retrieve information unavailable to conventional non-invasive brain imaging techniques. To evaluate the benefits of on-scalp MEG in epilepsy, we performed the first-ever such measurement on an epilepsy patient. METHODS: Conducted as a benchmarking study focusing on interictal epileptiform discharge (IED) detectability, an on-scalp high-temperature superconducting quantum interference device magnetometer (high-Tc SQUID) system was compared to a conventional, low-temperature SQUID system. Co-registration of electroencephalopraphy (EEG) was performed. A novel machine learning-based IED-detection algorithm was developed to aid identification of on-scalp MEG unique IEDs. RESULTS: Conventional MEG contained 24 IEDs. On-scalp MEG revealed 47 IEDs (16 co-registered by EEG, 31 unique to the on-scalp MEG recording). CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that on-scalp MEG might capture IEDs not seen by other non-invasive modalities. SIGNIFICANCE: On-scalp MEG has the potential of improving non-invasive epilepsy evaluation.

Attentional modulation of the auditory steady-state response across the cortex.

Selective auditory attention allows us to focus on relevant sounds within noisy or complex auditory environments, and is essential for the processing of speech and music. The auditory steady-state response (ASSR) has been proposed as a neural measure for tracking selective auditory attention, even within continuous and complex soundscapes. However, the current literature is inconsistent on how the ASSR is influenced by selective attention, with findings based primarily on attention being directed to either ear rather than to sound content. In this experiment, a mixture of melody streams was presented to both ears identically (diotically) as we examined if selective auditory attention to sound content influences the ASSR. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we assessed the stream-specific ASSRs from three frequency-tagged melody streams when attention was directed between each melody stream, based on their respective pitch and timing. Our main results showed that selective attention enhances the ASSR power of an attended melody stream by 14% at a general sensor level. This ability to readily capture attentional changes in a stimuli-precise manner makes the ASSR a useful tool for studying selective auditory attention, especially in complex auditory environments. As a secondary aim, we explored the distribution of cortical ASSR sources and their respective attentional modulation using a distributed source model of the ASSR activity. Notably, we uncovered the existence of ASSR attentional modulation outside the temporal cortices. Across-subject averages of the attentional enhancement over the cortical surface suggest that frontal regions show up to ~80% enhancement, while temporal and parietal cortices were enhanced by 20-25%. Importantly, this work advocates a novel 'beyond the temporal cortex' perspective on ASSR modulation and also serves as a template for future studies to precisely pin-point which cortical sites are more susceptible to ASSR attentional modulation.

Can EEG and MEG detect signals from the human cerebellum?

The cerebellum plays a key role in the regulation of motor learning, coordination and timing, and has been implicated in sensory and cognitive processes as well. However, our current knowledge of its electrophysiological mechanisms comes primarily from direct recordings in animals, as investigations into cerebellar function in humans have instead predominantly relied on lesion, haemodynamic and metabolic imaging studies. While the latter provide fundamental insights into the contribution of the cerebellum to various cerebellar-cortical pathways mediating behaviour, they remain limited in terms of temporal and spectral resolution. In principle, this shortcoming could be overcome by monitoring the cerebellum's electrophysiological signals. Non-invasive assessment of cerebellar electrophysiology in humans, however, is hampered by the limited spatial resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) in subcortical structures, i.e., deep sources. Furthermore, it has been argued that the anatomical configuration of the cerebellum leads to signal cancellation in MEG and EEG. Yet, claims that MEG and EEG are unable to detect cerebellar activity have been challenged by an increasing number of studies over the last decade. Here we address this controversy and survey reports in which electrophysiological signals were successfully recorded from the human cerebellum. We argue that the detection of cerebellum activity non-invasively with MEG and EEG is indeed possible and can be enhanced with appropriate methods, in particular using connectivity analysis in source space. We provide illustrative examples of cerebellar activity detected with MEG and EEG. Furthermore, we propose practical guidelines to optimize the detection of cerebellar activity with MEG and EEG. Finally, we discuss MEG and EEG signal contamination that may lead to localizing spurious sources in the cerebellum and suggest ways of handling such artefacts. This review is to be read as a perspective review that highlights that it is indeed possible to measure cerebellum with MEG and EEG and encourages MEG and EEG researchers to do so. Its added value beyond highlighting and encouraging is that it offers useful advice for researchers aspiring to investigate the cerebellum with MEG and EEG.