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Biomedical subjects

Stewart Boyd

Publications and source records attributed to Stewart Boyd.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Identification and characterization of somatosensory off responses.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been recorded in response to the offset of sensory stimulation in both the auditory and visual modalities. The present experiment employed vibratory stimulation to characterize somatosensory ERPs in response to different duration stimuli. In two separate experiments, we recorded attended and unattended somatosensory ERPs to 70 Hz, sine wave stimuli using the following durations: 20 ms, 50 ms, 70 ms, 150 ms, 170 ms, 250 ms and 1000 ms. An oscillating coil delivered stimuli through a 'T-bar' to digits 2 and 3 of the right hand. The amplitude and latency measurements of P50, P100 and a later negative component (No1) were analyzed using MANOVA. There was no significant difference in the latency values of the P50 and P100, but as the duration increased, there was a significant increase (P < 0.01) in the latency of No1. No1 appeared 130 ms +/- 9 ms following the offset of the stimulus. Amplitude values of the P50 and P100 components decreased as the stimulus duration increased and this effect became significant (P < 0.05) as the duration difference increased. Stimuli of 150 ms or greater evoked a negative baseline shift that persisted for the duration of the stimulus and area measurements in 7 out of the 10 subjects showed a significant increase in amplitude when the stimulus was attended. An intracranial case study supported these findings. The characteristics of the No1 component indicate it is a somatosensory off response, and it, in conjunction with the P50 and sustained potential, may reflect activity of a neural system that is responsive to changes in the tactile environment.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Cortical pain responses in human infants.

Despite the recent increase in our understanding of the development of pain processing, it is still not known whether premature infants are capable of processing pain at a cortical level. In this study, changes in cerebral oxygenation over the somatosensory cortex were measured in response to noxious stimulation using real-time near-infrared spectroscopy in 18 infants aged between 25 and 45 weeks postmenstrual age. The noxious stimuli were heel lances performed for routine blood sampling; no blood tests were performed solely for the purpose of the study. Noxious stimulation produced a clear cortical response, measured as an increase in total hemoglobin concentration [HbT] in the contralateral somatosensory cortex, from 25 weeks (mean Delta[HbT] = 7.74 micromol/L; SE, 1.10). Cortical responses were significantly greater in awake compared with sleeping infants, with a mean difference of 6.63 micromol/L [95% confidence interval (CI) limits: 2.35, 10.91 micromol/L; mean age, 35.2 weeks]. In awake infants, the response in the contralateral somatosensory cortex increased with age (regression coefficient, 0.698 micromol/L/week; 95% CI limits: 0.132, 1.265 micromol/L/week) and the latency decreased with age (regression coefficient, -0.9861 micromol/L/week; 95% CI limits: -1.5361, -0.4361 micromol/L/week; age range, 25-38 weeks). The response was modality specific because no response was detected after non-noxious stimulation of the heel, even when accompanied by reflex withdrawal of the foot. We conclude that noxious information is transmitted to the preterm infant cortex from 25 weeks, highlighting the potential for both higher-level pain processing and pain-induced plasticity in the human brain from a very early age.

Brain Mapping↗
PubMed2005

Sickle cell disease: ischemia and seizures.

Although the prevalence of seizures in children with sickle cell disease (SCD) is 10 times that of the general population, there are few prospectively collected data on mechanism. With transcranial Doppler and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and angiography, we evaluated 76 patients with sickle cell disease, 29 asymptomatic and 47 with neurological complications (seizures, stroke, transient ischemic attack, learning difficulty, headaches, or abnormal transcranial Doppler), who also underwent bolus-tracking perfusion MRI. The six patients with recent seizures also had electroencephalography. Group comparisons (seizure, nonseizure, and asymptomatic) indicated that abnormal transcranial Doppler was more common in the seizure (4/6; 67%) and nonseizure (26/41; 63%) groups than in the asymptomatic (10/29; 34%) group (chi2; p = 0.045), but abnormal structural MRI (chi2; p = 0.7) or magnetic resonance angiography (chi2; p = 0.2) were not. Relative decreased cerebral perfusion was found in all seizure patients and in 16 of 32 of the remaining patients with successful perfusion MRI (p = 0.03). In the seizure patients, the perfusion abnormalities in five were ipsilateral to electroencephalographic abnormalities; one had normal electroencephalogram results. These findings suggest that vasculopathy and focal hypoperfusion may be factors in the development of sickle cell disease-associated seizures.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Speech and non-speech processing in hemispherectomised children: an event-related potential study.

Although hemispherectomy is now used as a radical treatment for intractable seizures in a number of centres, there have been limited electrophysiological studies investigating post-procedure auditory-speech processing and recovery or reorganisation. We therefore recorded auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by pure tones and syllables employing a 51-channel electrode array concentrated over the functional hemisphere in 17 patients (nine males, mean age 14.2 years) who had undergone hemispherectomy for intractable seizures; eight of the patients had congenital brain damage and nine had sustained their initial insult at an age of 1 year or older. For comparison, recordings were made from 10 controls (five males, mean age 13.5 years). Responses from patients consisted of five small amplitude components restricted to the functional hemisphere whose scalp polarity was opposite to the ERPs observed in control subjects. The topography of the auditory ERPs in the patients was localised to the centro-temporal regions of the functional hemisphere in comparison to the midline distribution observed in control subjects. As in the control subjects, the latencies of the components evoked by tones were shorter than those evoked by syllables in both left and right hemispherectomised children. In addition, further analysis of the N1 and P2 component revealed increased syllable latencies in left hemispherectomised children only. The results of this study suggest that the left hemisphere alone may be more efficient at processing both pure tones and syllables compared to the right or both together.

Acoustic Stimulation↗