Regulation of pro and anti-inflammatory signaling molecules in effect of Withania Somnifera root extract treated sleep deprivation induced Wistar rats.

Sleep plays an imperative role in maintaining good health. Sleep along with circadian cycle wields strong regulatory control over immunity. Sleep deprivation (SD) is a threat to health developing several immunological disorders. The medicinal plant Withania somnifera (WS) root extract is widely used for its immuno-modulatory properties. Therefore, it is of interest to assess the effect of WS root extract on pro and anti-inflammatory signalling in SD rats. 24 male Wistar rats (120-150g) were divided into 4 groups with 6 animals in each. The groups were divided such that Group I - cage control, Group II - large platform control, Group III - sleep deprived & Group IV - WS treated SD rats. RT-PCR based mRNA expression analysis of pro inflammatory (IL-1ß, IL-6, MCP-1, TNF-α) and anti-inflammatory marker (IL-10) in the cortex of control and SD rats were completed. Concurrent protein expression analysis was completed using western blot. Data was analyzed using one-way ANOVA and Duncan's multiple range test in SPSS software version 20. Data showed elevation of pro-inflammatory markers and depression of IL-10. Thus, WS down regulated the pro-inflammatory and up-regulated the anti-inflammatory molecules, which can be further considered towards the treatment of sleep deprivation induced inflammatory diseases.

Optimal set of EEG features for emotional state classification and trajectory visualization in Parkinson's disease.

In addition to classic motor signs and symptoms, individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) are characterized by emotional deficits. Ongoing brain activity can be recorded by electroencephalograph (EEG) to discover the links between emotional states and brain activity. This study utilized machine-learning algorithms to categorize emotional states in PD patients compared with healthy controls (HC) using EEG. Twenty non-demented PD patients and 20 healthy age-, gender-, and education level-matched controls viewed happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust emotional stimuli while fourteen-channel EEG was being recorded. Multimodal stimulus (combination of audio and visual) was used to evoke the emotions. To classify the EEG-based emotional states and visualize the changes of emotional states over time, this paper compares four kinds of EEG features for emotional state classification and proposes an approach to track the trajectory of emotion changes with manifold learning. From the experimental results using our EEG data set, we found that (a) bispectrum feature is superior to other three kinds of features, namely power spectrum, wavelet packet and nonlinear dynamical analysis; (b) higher frequency bands (alpha, beta and gamma) play a more important role in emotion activities than lower frequency bands (delta and theta) in both groups and; (c) the trajectory of emotion changes can be visualized by reducing subject-independent features with manifold learning. This provides a promising way of implementing visualization of patient's emotional state in real time and leads to a practical system for noninvasive assessment of the emotional impairments associated with neurological disorders.

Emotion classification in Parkinson's disease by higher-order spectra and power spectrum features using EEG signals: a comparative study.

Deficits in the ability to process emotions characterize several neuropsychiatric disorders and are traits of Parkinson's disease (PD), and there is need for a method of quantifying emotion, which is currently performed by clinical diagnosis. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, being an activity of central nervous system (CNS), can reflect the underlying true emotional state of a person. This study applied machine-learning algorithms to categorize EEG emotional states in PD patients that would classify six basic emotions (happiness and sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust) in comparison with healthy controls (HC). Emotional EEG data were recorded from 20 PD patients and 20 healthy age-, education level- and sex-matched controls using multimodal (audio-visual) stimuli. The use of nonlinear features motivated by the higher-order spectra (HOS) has been reported to be a promising approach to classify the emotional states. In this work, we made the comparative study of the performance of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers using the features derived from HOS and from the power spectrum. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that power spectrum and HOS based features were statistically significant among the six emotional states (p < 0.0001). Classification results shows that using the selected HOS based features instead of power spectrum based features provided comparatively better accuracy for all the six classes with an overall accuracy of 70.10% ± 2.83% and 77.29% ± 1.73% for PD patients and HC in beta (13-30 Hz) band using SVM classifier. Besides, PD patients achieved less accuracy in the processing of negative emotions (sadness, fear, anger and disgust) than in processing of positive emotions (happiness, surprise) compared with HC. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of applying machine learning techniques to the classification of emotional states in PD patients in a user independent manner using EEG signals. The accuracy of the system can be improved by investigating the other HOS based features. This study might lead to a practical system for noninvasive assessment of the emotional impairments associated with neurological disorders.