Primary myoepithelial carcinoma of the lung: a rare entity treated with parenchymal sparing resection

Primary lung myoepithelial carcinomas are rare neoplasms arising from the salivary glands of the respiratory epithelium. Given the rare occurrences and reports of these tumors, appropriate recommendations for resection are difficult to formulate. Although classified as low-grade neoplasms, these tumors have a significant rate of recurrence and distant metastasis

Imaging Lung Disease in Systemic Sclerosis

Interstitial lung disease and pulmonary hypertension (PH) are the most common cardiopulmonary findings in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc). About two thirds of patients suffering from SSc develop scleroderma interstitial lung disease. PH is present in about 20% of SSc patients and is typically associated with severe lung disease, although it may be an isolated manifestation of SSc. High-resolution CT scanning is a key method for evaluating chest involvement. There are four roles of imaging in scleroderma interstitial lung disease: 1) detection of lung involvement, 2) identification of patients likely to respond to treatment, 3) assessment of treatment efficacy, and 4) exclusion of other significant diseases to include PH and cardiac and esophageal abnormalities

Mapping the prion protein distribution in marsupials: insights from comparing opossum with mouse CNS

The cellular form of the prion protein (PrP(C)) is a sialoglycoprotein widely expressed in the central nervous system (CNS) of mammalian species during neurodevelopment and in adulthood. The location of the protein in the CNS may play a role in the susceptibility of a species to fatal prion diseases, which are also known as the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). To date, little is known about PrP(C) distribution in marsupial mammals, for which no naturally occurring prion diseases have been reported. To extend our understanding of varying PrP(C) expression profiles in different mammals we carried out a detailed expression analysis of PrP(C) distribution along the neurodevelopment of the metatherian South American short-tailed opossum (Monodelphis domestica). We detected lower levels of PrP(C) in white matter fiber bundles of opossum CNS compared to mouse CNS. This result is consistent with a possible role for PrP(C) in the distinct neurodevelopment and neurocircuitry found in marsupials compared to other mammalian species

Detection of Prion Protein Particles in Blood Plasma of Scrapie Infected Sheep

Prion diseases are transmissible neurodegenerative diseases affecting humans and animals. The agent of the disease is the prion consisting mainly, if not solely, of a misfolded and aggregated isoform of the host-encoded prion protein (PrP). Transmission of prions can occur naturally but also accidentally, e.g. by blood transfusion, which has raised serious concerns about blood product safety and emphasized the need for a reliable diagnostic test. In this report we present a method based on surface-FIDA (fluorescence intensity distribution analysis), that exploits the high state of molecular aggregation of PrP as an unequivocal diagnostic marker of the disease, and show that it can detect infection in blood. To prepare PrP aggregates from blood plasma we introduced a detergent and lipase treatment to separate PrP from blood lipophilic components. Prion protein aggregates were subsequently precipitated by phosphotungstic acid, immobilized on a glass surface by covalently bound capture antibodies, and finally labeled with fluorescent antibody probes. Individual PrP aggregates were visualized by laser scanning microscopy where signal intensity was proportional to aggregate size. After signal processing to remove the background from low fluorescence particles, fluorescence intensities of all remaining PrP particles were summed. We detected PrP aggregates in plasma samples from six out of ten scrapie-positive sheep with no false positives from uninfected sheep. Applying simultaneous intensity and size discrimination, ten out of ten samples from scrapie sheep could be differentiated from uninfected sheep. The implications for ante mortem diagnosis of prion diseases are discussed

Visual Stability and the Motion Aftereffect: A Psychophysical Study Revealing Spatial Updating

Eye movements create an ever-changing image of the world on the retina. In particular, frequent saccades call for a compensatory mechanism to transform the changing visual information into a stable percept. To this end, the brain presumably uses internal copies of motor commands. Electrophysiological recordings of visual neurons in the primate lateral intraparietal cortex, the frontal eye fields, and the superior colliculus suggest that the receptive fields (RFs) of special neurons shift towards their post-saccadic positions before the onset of a saccade. However, the perceptual consequences of these shifts remain controversial. We wanted to test in humans whether a remapping of motion adaptation occurs in visual perception

Rubber Hands Feel Touch, but Not in Blind Individuals

Psychology and neuroscience have a long-standing tradition of studying blind individuals to investigate how visual experience shapes perception of the external world. Here, we study how blind people experience their own body by exposing them to a multisensory body illusion: the somatic rubber hand illusion. In this illusion, healthy blindfolded participants experience that they are touching their own right hand with their left index finger, when in fact they are touching a rubber hand with their left index finger while the experimenter touches their right hand in a synchronized manner (Ehrsson et al. 2005). We compared the strength of this illusion in a group of blind individuals (n = 10), all of whom had experienced severe visual impairment or complete blindness from birth, and a group of age-matched blindfolded sighted participants (n = 12). The illusion was quantified subjectively using questionnaires and behaviorally by asking participants to point to the felt location of the right hand. The results showed that the sighted participants experienced a strong illusion, whereas the blind participants experienced no illusion at all, a difference that was evident in both tests employed. A further experiment testing the participants' basic ability to localize the right hand in space without vision (proprioception) revealed no difference between the two groups. Taken together, these results suggest that blind individuals with impaired visual development have a more veridical percept of self-touch and a less flexible and dynamic representation of their own body in space compared to sighted individuals. We speculate that the multisensory brain systems that re-map somatosensory signals onto external reference frames are less developed in blind individuals and therefore do not allow efficient fusion of tactile and proprioceptive signals from the two upper limbs into a single illusory experience of self-touch as in sighted individuals

Comparative genetic analysis: the utility of mouse genetic systems for studying human monogenic disease

One of the long-term goals of mutagenesis programs in the mouse has been to generate mutant lines to facilitate the functional study of every mammalian gene. With a combination of complementary genetic approaches and advances in technology, this aim is slowly becoming a reality. One of the most important features of this strategy is the ability to identify and compare a number of mutations in the same gene, an allelic series. With the advent of gene-driven screening of mutant archives, the search for a specific series of interest is now a practical option. This review focuses on the analysis of multiple mutations from chemical mutagenesis projects in a wide variety of genes and the valuable functional information that has been obtained from these studies. Although gene knockouts and transgenics will continue to be an important resource to ascertain gene function, with a significant proportion of human diseases caused by point mutations, identifying an allelic series is becoming an equally efficient route to generating clinically relevant and functionally important mouse models

Evidence-based Kernels: Fundamental Units of Behavioral Influence

This paper describes evidence-based kernels, fundamental units of behavioral influence that appear to underlie effective prevention and treatment for children, adults, and families. A kernel is a behavior–influence procedure shown through experimental analysis to affect a specific behavior and that is indivisible in the sense that removing any of its components would render it inert. Existing evidence shows that a variety of kernels can influence behavior in context, and some evidence suggests that frequent use or sufficient use of some kernels may produce longer lasting behavioral shifts. The analysis of kernels could contribute to an empirically based theory of behavioral influence, augment existing prevention or treatment efforts, facilitate the dissemination of effective prevention and treatment practices, clarify the active ingredients in existing interventions, and contribute to efficiently developing interventions that are more effective. Kernels involve one or more of the following mechanisms of behavior influence: reinforcement, altering antecedents, changing verbal relational responding, or changing physiological states directly. The paper describes 52 of these kernels, and details practical, theoretical, and research implications, including calling for a national database of kernels that influence human behavior