I plan in this editorial to place ischemic preconditioning into a historical context, to critique its potential benefits, risks, and limitations, and to try to look ahead at its future applications if any.

We conducted a comprehensive literature review on the available published data about the potential effect of remote ischemic preconditioning in patients undergoing ischemia reperfusion injury on variable clinical settings (abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, open heart surgery, percutaneous coronary intervention, living donor renal transplantation, coronary angiography, elective decompression surgery, carotid endarterectomy, recent stroke or transient ischemic attack combined with intracranial carotid artery stenosis). Most of the trials focused on postoperative cardiac or renal function after RIPC with conflicting results, partly because preconditioning protocols, age limits, comorbidities and concomitant drug use varied significantly across the aforementioned trials. However, no severe local adverse events were observed in any patient undergoing limb or arm preconditioning, suggesting that RIPC is a safe and well tolerated procedure that may constitute a potentially promising innovative treatment in atherosclerotic diseases.

We provide the first evidence that the number of dopamine neurons in the adult mouse midbrain is altered by natural environmental or behavioral stimuli, and this is mediated by afferent input, presumably relaying information from the environment or about behavior to midbrain neurons.

Aging and vascular processes interact to disrupt cerebral hemodynamics in older adults. The current study used ASL imaging to show that reduced cerebral perfusion is independently associated with poorer cognition, smaller TBV, and reduced cortical thickness in older adults. Prospective studies are needed to clarify patterns of cognitive decline and brain atrophy associated with cerebral hypoperfusion.

We propose a novel and general approach to reverse the coarse-grained approach by locating the exact sources of the functional circuit abnormalities. The approach is applied to hate circuit in depression. We compare our approach with ordinary coarse-grained approach in several aspects. A software package of this approach is also obtained.

After acute ischemic stroke, circulating endothelial progenitor cell (EPC) counts peaked at day 7. Pretreatment with statins increased the levels of EPC. In patients with large-artery atherosclerosis and small-vessel disease subtypes, higher counts were related to better outcome at 3 months.

Diabetes patients can exhibit demyelinating features on nerve conduction testing, but this group differs from those patients diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). In those with diabetes + CIDP, the neuropathy is more severe on clinical and electrophysiological criteria despite the patients having better glycemic control as compared to diabetes patients with the demyelinating form of diabetic neuropathy who are typified by suboptimal glycemic control.

Consecutive sections immunostained with NF200 (green), MBP (red), and DAPI (blue) and imaged at 40x showed robust NF200 and MBP immunostaining in the anterior funiculus of normal controls and laquinimod pre- and post-treated EAE groups. In contrast, sections from vehicle-treated EAE mice had decreased myelin and axonal staining.

The experiments presented in this article replicate and reevaluate earlier functional magnetic resonance imaging studies on multiple object tracking (MOT). We found (bilateral) activations in the premotor cortex during MOT. These findings are in line with the idea that sensorimotor prediction processes are engaged during the tracking of arbitrary and abstract object motion.

The molecular mechanism underlying pathological changes observed in the neuropathic nerve remains unclear but one candidate molecule, RAGE (the receptor for advanced glycation end-products), has recently gained attention as a potential contributor to neuropathy. Here for the first time we focused on the expression of RAGE in normal, idiopathic and diabetic neuropathic human nerves. We established that the levels of RAGE and its pro-inflammatory ligands, carboxymethyllysine (CML) and high mobility group box 1 (HMBG1) are increased in both idiopathic and diabetic nerve. Our finding suggests roles for RAGE and its inflammatory ligands in human peripheral neuropathies.

The blood pressure (BP) of many patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) fluctuates greatly in a day and often exceeds over 200 mmHg even in the early stages of the disease. Twenty-four-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, not BP measurement once a day, enables us to determine the actual BP in PD patients, so that we can treat BP fluctuation with hypertension which may lead to various vascular events.

We investigated brain activation and connectivity in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients with self-reported fatigue. Brain activation in the left posterior parietal cortex and the right substantia nigra was positively correlated to perceived fatigue ratings. MS participants had stronger cortical-to-cortical and subcortical-to-subcortical connectivity, whereas they had weaker cortical-to-subcortical connectivity.

By making use of event-related potentials (ERPs) we have shown that 12-month-old infants can already quickly detect object changes in contextually rich environments. Initial detection of a change in location, change in identity, and a switch of two objects was shown within 300 msec. Additional conscious processing was shown for object change and location change, reflecting the updating of the memory representation of the new configurations.

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition) (DSM-IV) three-factor posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnostic criteria was conducted to determine fit for this patient population. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of alternate symptom structures was planned to identify symptoms that cluster in this population. The response of symptom factors to treatment with venlafaxine extended release (ER) was explored.

Movement-related cerebral fields (MRCFs) in magnetoencephalography (MEG) are confirmed over the sensorimotor region contralateral to the movement. We used a single-dipole analysis to separately model each of these components in the MRCF waveform, and found that equivalent current dipoles of all components of MRCFs were estimated to be located in the same precentral motor region, and did not differ with respect to their locations and orientations. These results suggested that the entire MRCF waveform could be modeled by a single source localized in the precentral motor region.