Swallowing impairment or dysphagia has many possible causes with severe sequelae. One major mediator of the relationship between causes and sequelae is the physiologic impairment of the swallowing mechanism. Assessing the physiology of swallowing impairment is of great importance so that treatment can target physiology to mitigate sequelae. The assessment...
Involuntary motor activities such as spasms arise from hyperreflexia in about 70% of individuals with spinal cord injuries (SCI). Despite this prevalence and the negative impact on health and safety, it is unclear what determines the severity of the spasms that develop. This study investigated the impact of injury severity...
Different features of the visual world are conveyed to the retino-recipient regions of the brain by more than 40 types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCS). Feature detection by RGCs depends on a combination of intrinsic and morphological properties where the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory inputs occurs through local retinal...
The basal ganglia operate largely in closed parallel loops, including an associative circuit for goal-directed behavior originating from the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) and a somatosensory circuit important for habit formation originating from the dorsolateral striatum (DLS). An exception to this parallel circuit organization was proposed to explain how information is...
Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent, recurrent, and major public health problems. Decades of research has uncovered associations between symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression and abnormal neural activation across executive control-, threat-, and reward-related networks. Recent studies have developed a hierarchical symptom structure of anxiety and depression termed the...
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a high-resolution, non-contact, three-dimensional imaging technique, which has revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Visible-light OCT (vis-OCT) extends OCT by enabling retinal oximetry – the measurement of oxygen saturation of hemoglobin from within individual retinal blood vessels. Three advances in the vis-OCT technique...
Contactin associated protein like 2 (CNTNAP2) has emerged as a prominent susceptibility gene implicated in multiple complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD), intellectual disability (ID), and schizophrenia (SCZ). The presence of seizure comorbidity in many of these cases, as well as inhibitory neuron dysfunction in Cntnap2 knockout (KO)...