Biomedical subjects

P Jerabek

Publications and source records attributed to P Jerabek.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2000

Differential limbic--cortical correlates of sadness and anxiety in healthy subjects: implications for affective disorders.

BACKGROUND: Affective disorders are associated with comorbidity of depression and anxiety symptoms. Positron emission tomography resting-state studies in affective disorders have generally failed to isolate specific symptom effects. Emotion provocation studies in healthy volunteers have produced variable results, due to differences in experimental paradigm and instructions. METHODS: To better delineate the neural correlates of sad mood and anxiety, this study used autobiographical memory scripts in eight healthy women to generate sadness, anxiety, or a neutral relaxed state in a within-subject design. RESULTS: Sadness and anxiety, when contrasted to a neutral emotional state, engaged a set of distinct paralimbic-cortical regions, with a limited number of common effects. Sadness was accompanied by specific activations of the subgenual cingulate area (BA) 25 and dorsal insula, specific deactivation of the right prefrontal cortex BA 9, and more prominent deactivation of the posterior parietal cortex BAs 40/7. Anxiety was associated with specific activations of the ventral insula, the orbitofrontal and anterior temporal cortices, specific deactivation of parahippocampal gyri, and more prominent deactivation of the inferior temporal cortex BAs 20/37. CONCLUSIONS: These findings are interpreted within a model in which sadness and anxiety are represented by segregated corticolimbic pathways, where a major role is played by selective dorsal cortical deactivations during sadness, and ventral cortical deactivations in anxiety.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Intersubject variability in cortical activations during a complex language task.

Intersubject variability in the functional organization of the human brain has theoretical and practical importance for basic and clinical neuroscience. In the present study, positron emission tomography (PET) and anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were used to study the functional anatomy of language processes. Intersubject variability in task-induced activations in six brain regions was assessed in 20 normal subjects (10 men and 10 women) for frequency of occurrence, location, intensity, and extent. A complex, but well-studied task (overt verb generation) was compared to a simple baseline (visual fixation) to induce activations in brain areas serving perceptual, motoric, and cognitive functions. The frequency of occurrence was high for all selected brain areas (80-95%). The variability in response location in Talairach space, expressed as the standard deviation along each axis (x, y, z), ranged from 5.2 to 9.9 mm. This variability appears to be uniformly distributed across the brain, uninfluenced by regional differences in the complexity of gyral anatomy or mediated behavior. The variability in response location, expressed as the average Euclidean distances (averaged across subjects) about mean locations of activations, varied from 9.40 to 13.36 mm and had no significant differences by region (P>0.05, beta = 0.20). Intensity variability was also relatively small and homogenous across brain regions. In contrast, response extent was much more variable both across subjects and across brain regions (0.79 to 1.77, coefficient of variation). These findings are in good agreement with previous PET studies of intersubject variability and bode well for the possibility of using functional neuroimaging to study neural plasticity subsequent to congenital and acquired brain lesions.

Adult↗

PubMed1997

Imaging human intra-cerebral connectivity by PET during TMS.

Non-invasive imaging of human inter-regional neural connectivity by positron emission tomography (PET) during transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was performed. The hand area of primary motor cortex (M1) in the left cerebral hemisphere was stimulated with TMS while local and remote effects were recorded with PET. At the stimulated site, TMS increased blood flow (12-20%) in a highly focal manner, without an inhibitory surround. Remote covariances, an index of connectivity with M1, were also focal. Connectivity patterns established in non-human species were generally confirmed. Excitatory connectivity (positive covariance) was observed in ipsilateral primary and secondary somatosensory areas (S1 and S2), in ipsilateral ventral, lateral premotor cortex (M2) and in contralateral supplementary motor area (SMA). Inhibitory connectivity (negative covariance) was observed in contralateral M1.

Brain Mapping↗

PubMed1996

A PET study of the neural systems of stuttering.

The cause of stuttering is unknown. Failure to develop left-hemispheric dominance for speech is a long-standing theory although others implicated the motor system more broadly, often postulating hyperactivity of the right (language nondominant) cerebral hemisphere. As knowledge of motor circuitry has advanced, theories of stuttering have become more anatomically specific, postulating hyperactivity of premotor cortex, either directly or through connectivity with the thalamus and basal ganglia. Alternative theories target the auditory and speech production systems. By contrasting stuttering with fluent speech using positron emission tomography combined with chorus reading to induce fluency, we found support for each of these hypotheses. Stuttering induced widespread overactivations of the motor system in both cerebrum and cerebellum, with right cerebral dominance. Stuttered reading lacked left-lateralized activations of the auditory system, which are thought to support the self-monitoring of speech, and selectively deactivated a frontal-temporal system implicated in speech production. Induced fluency decreased or eliminated the overactivity in most motor areas, and largely reversed the auditory-system underactivations and the deactivation of the speech production system. Thus stuttering is a disorder affecting the multiple neural systems used for speaking.

Adult↗

PubMed1996

Functional-lesion investigation of developmental stuttering with positron emission tomography.

Positron emission tomographic (PET) H2(15)O measurements of resting-state regional cerebral blood flow (CBF) were obtained in 29 right-handed men, 10 of whom stuttered and 19 of whom did not. PET images were analyzed by sampling 74 regions of interest (ROIs), 37 per hemisphere. ROI placement was guided both physiologically and anatomically. Physiological ROI placement was based on speech motor activations. Anatomical ROIs were positioned by reference to a stereotactic, neurosurgical atlas with positions confirmed and finely adjusted by co-registered magnetic-resonance images (MRIs). For all subjects, PET and MR images were normal to visual inspection. Highly significant (p < 0.0001) between-region and between-hemisphere effects were found for both groups, as have been previously reported for normal subjects, but no significant between-group differences were found for any regional CBF values. Analysis by a laterality index found a weakly significant between-groups effect (p = 0.04) that was isolated to five regions, four of which are implicated in speech or hearing. However, these regional laterality effects showed no consistent directionality, nor did these regions have absolute differences in regional blood flow between groups. Present findings do not support recent suggestions that developmental stuttering is associated with abnormalities of brain blood flow at rest. Rather, our findings indicate an essentially normal functional brain terrain with a small number of minor differences in hemispheric symmetry.

Adult↗