Luis Garcia-Larrea

..Restoration of thalamic activity in neuropathic pain might represent one important condition to obtain successful relief by analgesic procedures, including cortical neurostimulation...

..These hemodynamic changes are lengthened and might therefore underlie the long-lasting clinical effects that largely outlast the actual stimulation periods...

..This, along with the delayed and long-lasting activation of several brain structures, is consistent with the clinical effects of MCS, which may also last for hours or days after MCS discontinuation...

..This suggests that their role in experimental allodynia would likely be reactive and protective, and that inability to generate their activation may contribute to the clinical expression of neuropathic pain...

..In selected contexts (pain sine materia, non-organic anaesthesia), normal or enhanced LEPs may support a psychogenic participation in the syndrome...

..To investigate cerebral activity associated with allodynia in patients with neuropathic pain...

....

....

..These results support the hypothesis that sensory stimulations activate a non-synaptic mode of dopamine release...

..Sensory stimulation of the forelimb extremities constitutes a well-established experimental model that has consistently shown to activate dopamine (DA) neurotransmission in the mammals' forebrain...

..This discrepancy between activities in a thalamic nucleus and its related cortical areas may compromise the spatio-temporal binding of the high-frequency activities, resulting in altered perceptual experiences during dream periods...

..In the present series, it proved to be much more discriminative than waking ERPs alone to demonstrate specific abnormalities in patients complaining of excessive daytime sleepiness...

..Our data also provide new elements supporting the persistence of the semantic N400 during 'shallow' word processing tasks, i.e. tasks that discourage analysis of semantic aspects of the words...

....

..Linguistic absurdity appears to be accepted in a different manner during paradoxical sleep than during waking, and this might explain why absurd contents are so naturally incorporated into otherwise plausible dream stories...

....

..744; p<0.0001). These results confirm that MCS can be a satisfactory and durable alternative to medical treatments in patients with refractory pain, and suggest that the efficacy of MCS may be predicted in the first month of therapy...

..Parasylvian pain may be extremely difficult to treat; the magnitude of pain-temperature sensory disturbances may be prognostic for its development, hence the importance of early sensory assessment with quantitative methods...

....

..This study compares the amplitude, latency, morphology, scalp topography and intracranial generators of laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) to CO(2) and Nd:YAP laser stimuli...

..The latter correlated with changes in the subjective appraisal of visual stimuli, and may underlie not only the change in their subjective assessment but also reactive processes aimed at coping with unpleasant contexts...

..This response appeared functionally related to the P3 wave, which in waking subjects has been associated to conscious perception and memory encoding...

..They should be considered as a motor component of pain-related processes activated in case of intense pain...

..We studied the possible contribution of the endogenous opioid system to MCS-related pain relief...

..These chronically implanted techniques provide satisfactory pain relief in many patients, including those resistant to medication or other means...

..To investigate changes in Event-Related Coherence (ERCoh) associated to good and bad resolution of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)...

..Central and peripheral forms of NP may differ in distribution of brain opioid system changes and this in turn might underlie their different sensitivity to opiates...

..Memory encoding and recall, rather than sensory processing, appear to be modulated by empathy with others' physical suffering...

..The precise biochemical nature of these mechanisms remains to be investigated...

..Notably, non-target responses may help to decide whether an abnormal target-P300 is related or not to a deficit in the mobilization of attentional resources...

....

....

..This metabolic response in the hypometabolic focus, observed in the absence of any epileptic discharge during FDG accumulation and PET data acquisition, suggests that GABAA receptors are up-regulated or, at least, preserved in TLE...

....

....

....

....

..BAEPs are resistant to hypothermia and barbiturates, but must be interpreted cautiously in patients treated with a combination of anesthetic drugs that includes lidocaine...

..Serial recording of cortical EPs should be added to BAEP monitoring to permit the early detection of rostrocaudal deterioration...

..Routine recording of nociceptive reflexes in man proved to be a useful tool for the objective evaluation of anatomo-physiological effects of functional neurosurgical procedures...

....

..Also IPLs were increased in 12 patients with normal P14 amplitudes. These results suggest that adding the P9/P14 amplitude criterion to standard IPL data might be useful to detect conduction troubles in MS patients...

..The degree of temporal perfusion asymmetry measured in each individual was higher in patients whose MRI was abnormal...

..The late negative component (N140) shares several features with the 'processing negativity' described in auditory paradigms and could represent the equivalent of this effect in the somatosensory system...

..The present paradigm proved to be easy to implement and suitable to study the 'executive' functions governing attentional and working-memory control during the performance of multiple tasks...

..Such effects may be obtained only if thalamic activation reaches a 'threshold' level, below which the analgesic cascade would not be successfully triggered...

..This study aimed at assessing the relevance of mesio-temporal dipoles, as identified by modeling of scalp recorded spikes in TLE...

..This response is likely to be responsible for the strange and very unpleasant allodynic sensation elicited on the left side by a non-noxious stimulation...

..Our results suggest that continuous brain-stem monitoring could be helpful for management of comatose head-injured patients...

....

..In contrast, the hypothesis of somatosensory cortex activation by MCS could not be confirmed by our results...

..On the other hand, our analysis suggests that in PLM patients the concomitant existence of a RLS is not related to the frequency of occurrence of PLMs, at least when these latter are quantified independently of their arousal index...

..We discuss implications for the rule vs instance debate, and similarities between this late positivity and the P600 observed in previous studies of syntactic processing...

..All stimuli were disyllabic, equiprobable and presented in random order...

....

..Attentional processes could possibly explain part of the variability observed in previous PET reports and should therefore be considered in further studies on pain in both normal subjects and patients with chronic pain...

..To advance our knowledge of the mechanisms generating both abnormal pain and analgesia (drugs and surgical techniques) in patients is the main motivation of such anexciting challenge...

....

..The results also suggest that the cortical processes active during the N20 and N120 potentials may be essential for the conscious perception of somatosensory stimuli delivered to the hand...

..In 25% the method failed. On the basis of these findings and the literature data (127 reported cases), the authors advocate PCS in patients with severe and medically refractory poststroke pain...

....

..These functions are, not surprisingly, conducted in parallel with pain intensity coding and stimulus localization specifically subserved by the sensory-discriminative "lateral" pain system...

..Thus, asynchronous thalamo-cortical deactivation while falling asleep probably explains the production of hypnagogic hallucinations by a still-activated cortex and the common self-overestimation of the time needed to fall asleep...

..The results obtained illustrate the advantages of combining microdialysis with CE-LIFD for studying neurotransmitters with such a high sampling rate...

..To assess, using a double-blind procedure, the pain-relieving effects of rTMS against placebo, and their predictive value regarding the efficacy of implanted motor cortex stimulation (MCS)...

..This composite entity needs to be considered when LEP are experimentally or clinically used in the assessment of sensory and cognitive phenomena and abnormalities of pain sensation...

..Using spectral edge frequency (SEF95) and dimension of activation (DA), a new tool derived from the dimension of correlation, we assessed the activation of thalamus and cortex in the different vigilance states...

..Central processing of dyspnea relief remains largely unknown...

..All these data support the view that some semantic analysis of auditory stimuli remains possible in the human sleeping brain, and warrant further studies to elucidate the extent and limits of these capabilities...