SUSTAINING INNOVATIONS COMMUNITY HEALTH OUTPOST (POSYANDU) – LESSONS LEARNT

GAIN, in partnership with Indonesia’s Ministry of Health’s Directorate of Community Nutrition, embarked on a 6 year program called BADUTA 2014 – 2020 to supports the 1000 Days of Life Program Impact Pathway and to improve sustainability community health in East Java. One major component of the program is a behaviour change campaign called Rumpi Sehat (Health Gossip) and community activation designed to provoke an emotional response called “Emo-Demo’s” (emotional demonstrations).  GAIN’s team worked with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to develop the TV commercials and the Emo Demo’s. These activities include fun games, which are engaging and motivating mothers to participate and giving them the confidence to practice the right feeding behaviors. Also engaged the parents in an ‘emo demo’, routinely practiced at the health center, to trigger the disgust factor when dissolving these packaged snack foods in water (mimicking the stomach). GAIN and its partners have been documenting the  significant changes triggered by the Rumpi Sehat campaign and Emo – Demos Snacking, which are best practice examples of women who have taken action within their communities and advocating for better nutrition. Selected program result in 2017, are 6% increase of children 6 – 23 months of age consuming minimum number of food groups associated with nutrient adequacy, 12% increase of children 6 – 23 months of age consuming iron-rich foods, and 15% increase mothers of infants < 6 months of age who report exclusive breastfeeding

Single-photon calcium imaging for interrogating the circuitry of the frontoparietal cognitive control network

We will use miniscopes to detect activities in the frontal eye field, a brain region responsible for voluntary eye movements and perception and awareness in the field of vision. The detection of neuronal activity with calcium imaging can then be compared with the visual stimuli and eye movements expected. If successful, this project will show the feasibility of calcium imaging using miniscopes in this way and open the door for future work to expand our understanding of frontoparietal cortical circuits.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/brainscanprojectsummaries/1006/thumbnail.jp

Functional reorganization during the recovery of contralesional target selection deficits after prefrontal cortex lesions in macaque monkeys

© 2019 The Authors Visual extinction has been characterized by the failure to respond to a visual stimulus in the contralesional hemifield when presented simultaneously with an ipsilesional stimulus (Corbetta and Shulman, 2011). Unilateral damage to the macaque frontoparietal cortex commonly leads to deficits in contralesional target selection that resemble visual extinction. Recently, we showed that macaque monkeys with unilateral lesions in the caudal prefrontal cortex (PFC) exhibited contralesional target selection deficits that recovered over 2–4 months (Adam et al., 2019). Here, we investigated the longitudinal changes in functional connectivity (FC) of the frontoparietal network after a small or large right caudal PFC lesion in four macaque monkeys. We collected ultra-high field resting-state fMRI at 7-T before the lesion and at weeks 1–16 post-lesion and compared the functional data with behavioural performance on a free-choice saccade task. We found that the pattern of frontoparietal network FC changes depended on lesion size, such that the recovery of contralesional extinction was associated with an initial increase in network FC that returned to baseline in the two small lesion monkeys, whereas FC continued to increase throughout recovery in the two monkeys with a larger lesion. We also found that the FC between contralesional dorsolateral PFC and ipsilesional parietal cortex correlated with behavioural recovery and that the contralesional dorsolateral PFC showed increasing degree centrality with the frontoparietal network. These findings suggest that both the contralesional and ipsilesional hemispheres play an important role in the recovery of function. Importantly, optimal compensation after large PFC lesions may require greater recruitment of distant and intact areas of the frontoparietal network, whereas recovery from smaller lesions was supported by a normalization of the functional network

Developing a mechanistic understanding of crossmodal reorganization following sensory loss

Our long-term goal is to understand how plasticity reshapes circuits in the brain in response to atypical early experiences. This will allow us to better understand how the Deaf brain processes the world around us, and will make clear the challenges that must be overcome to optimize the function of cochlear implants and prostheses designed to restore sensory functions more broadly.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/brainscanprojectsummaries/1039/thumbnail.jp