Hypertriglyceridemia: a potential side effect of propofol sedation in critical illness

Purpose: Hypertriglyceridemia (hyperTG) is common among intensive care unit (ICU) patients, but knowledge about hyperTG risk factors is scarce. The present study aims to identify risk factors favoring its development in patients requiring prolonged ICU treatment. Methods: Prospective observational study in the medicosurgical ICU of a university teaching hospital. All consecutive patients staying ≥4days were enrolled. Potential risk factors were recorded: pathology, energy intake, amount and type of nutritional lipids, intake of propofol, glucose intake, laboratory parameters, and drugs. Triglyceride (TG) levels were assessed three times weekly. Statistics was based on two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and linear regression with potential risk factors. Results: Out of 1,301 consecutive admissions, 220 patients were eligible, of whom 99 (45%) presented hyperTG (triglycerides >2mmol/L). HyperTG patients were younger, heavier, with more brain injury and multiple trauma. Intake of propofol (mg/kg/h) and lipids' propofol had the highest correlation with plasma TG (r 2=0.28 and 0.26, respectively, both p<0.001). Infection and inflammation were associated with development of hyperTG [C-reactive protein (CRP), r 2=0.19, p=0.004]. No strong association could be found with nutritional lipids or other risk factors. Outcome was similar in normo- and hyperTG patients. Conclusions: HyperTG is frequent in the ICU but is not associated with adverse outcome. Propofol and accompanying lipid emulsion are the strongest risk factors. Our results suggest that plasma TG should be monitored at least twice weekly in patients on propofol. The clinical consequences of propofol-related hyperTG should be investigated in further studie

Safety and feasibility of intranasal heroin-assisted treatment: 4-week preliminary findings from a Swiss multicentre observational study

Background: Heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) is effective for individuals with severe opioid use disorder (OUD) who do not respond sufficiently to other opioid agonist treatments. It is mostly offered with injectable diacetylmorphine (DAM) or DAM tablets creating a barrier for individuals who need the rapid onset of action but are either unable or unwilling to inject, or primarily snort opioids. To explore another route of administration, we evaluated the safety and feasibility of intranasal (IN) DAM. Methods: This is a multicentre observational cohort study among patients in Swiss HAT. All patients planning to receive IN DAM within the treatment centres were eligible to participate. Participants were either completely switched to IN DAM or received IN DAM in addition to other DAM formulations or opioid agonists. Patients were followed up for four weeks. Sociodemographic characteristics, current HAT regimen, reasons for starting IN DAM, IN DAM doses, number of injection events in the sample, IN DAM continuation rate, and appearance of adverse events and nose-related problems were evaluated. Results: Participants (n = 52) reported vein damage, preference for nasal route of administration, and desire of a stronger effect or for a less harmful route of administration as primary reasons for switching to IN DAM. After four weeks, 90.4% of participants (n = 47) still received IN DAM. Weekly average realised injection events decreased by 44.4% from the month before IN DAM initiation to the month following. No severe adverse events were reported. Conclusions: After four weeks, IN DAM was a feasible and safe alternative to other routes of administration for patients with severe OUD in HAT. It addressed the needs of individuals with OUD and reduced injection behaviour. More long-term research efforts are needed to systematically assess efficacy of and patient satisfaction with IN DAM

Elemental and configural olfactory coding by antennal lobe neurons of the honeybee (Apis mellifera)

When smelling an odorant mixture, olfactory systems can be analytical (i.e. extract information about the mixture elements) or synthetic (i.e. creating a configural percept of the mixture). Here, we studied elemental and configural mixture coding in olfactory neurons of the honeybee antennal lobe, local neurons in particular. We conducted intracellular recordings and stimulated with monomolecular odorants and their coherent or incoherent binary mixtures to reproduce a temporally dynamic environment. We found that about half of the neurons responded as ‘elemental neurons’, i.e. responses evoked by mixtures reflected the underlying feature information from one of the components. The other half responded as ‘configural neurons’, i.e. responses to mixtures were clearly different from responses to their single components. Elemental neurons divided in late responders (above 60 ms) and early responder neurons (below 60 ms), whereas responses of configural coding neurons concentrated in-between these divisions. Latencies of neurons with configural responses express a tendency to be faster for coherent stimuli which implies employment in different processing circuits

The repeatability of cognitive performance:A meta-analysis

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from The Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Behavioural and cognitive processes play important roles in mediating an individual's interactions with its environment. Yet, while there is a vast literature on repeatable individual differences in behaviour, relatively little is known about the repeatability of cognitive performance. To further our understanding of the evolution of cognition, we gathered 44 studies on individual performance of 25 species across six animal classes and used meta-analysis to assess whether cognitive performance is repeatable. We compared repeatability (R) in performance (1) on the same task presented at different times (temporal repeatability), and (2) on different tasks that measured the same putative cognitive ability (contextual repeatability). We also addressed whether R estimates were influenced by seven extrinsic factors (moderators): type of cognitive performance measurement, type of cognitive task, delay between tests, origin of the subjects, experimental context, taxonomic class and publication status. We found support for both temporal and contextual repeatability of cognitive performance, with mean R estimates ranging between 0.15 and 0.28. Repeatability estimates were mostly influenced by the type of cognitive performance measures and publication status. Our findings highlight the widespread occurrence of consistent inter-individual variation in cognition across a range of taxa which, like behaviour, may be associated with fitness outcomes.PKYC is supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (PE1801); JOvH was funded by an ERC consolidator grant (616474). MC and this research was supported by a grant from the Human Frontier Science Program to ASC and JM-F (RGP0006/2015)

Axonal remodeling for motor recovery after traumatic brain injury requires downregulation of γ-aminobutyric acid signaling

Remodeling of the remnant neuronal network after brain injury possibly mediates spontaneous functional recovery; however, the mechanisms inducing axonal remodeling during spontaneous recovery remain unclear. Here, we show that altered γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) signaling is crucial for axonal remodeling of the contralesional cortex after traumatic brain injury. After injury to the sensorimotor cortex in mice, we found a significant decrease in the expression of GABAAR-α1 subunits in the intact sensorimotor cortex for 2 weeks. Motor functions, assessed by grid walk and cylinder tests, spontaneously improved in 4 weeks after the injury to the sensorimotor cortex. With motor recovery, corticospinal tract (CST) axons from the contralesional cortex sprouted into the denervated side of the cervical spinal cord at 2 and 4 weeks after the injury. To determine the functional implications of the changes in the expression of GABAAR-α1 subunits, we infused muscimol, a GABA R agonist, into the contralesional cortex for a week after the injury. Compared with the vehicle-treated mice, we noted significantly inhibited recovery in the muscimol-treated mice. Further, muscimol infusion greatly suppressed the axonal sprouting into the denervated side of the cervical spinal cord. In conclusion, recovery of motor function and axonal remodeling of the CST following cortical injury requires suppressed GABAAR subunit expression and decreased GABAergic signaling

A collaborative VR Murder Mystery using Photorealistic User Representations

The VRTogether project has developed a Social VR platform for remote communication and collaboration. The hyper-realistic representation of users, as volumetric video, allows for natural interaction in a virtual environment with others. This video shows one of the use cases, an escape room style, where remote users need to collaboratively resolve a murder mystery. The experience takes place in the victim’s apartment where the police team (avatars) together with up to four real-time captured users (point clouds), work as a team to find clues and come up with a conclusion about what happened to the victim and who was the criminal. This experience includes a layer of interaction, enabling the users to interact with the environment, by touching objects, and to talk to the characters. It also allows for navigating between the rooms of the apartment. The experience provides immersion and social connectedness, where users are protagonists of the story, sharing the virtual environment and following the narrative. The combination of virtual reality environments (space and characters) with novel technologies for real-time volumetric video conferencing enables unique new experiences in a number of areas such as healthcare, broadcasting, and gaming. The video can be watched here: https://youtu.be/Hsj1YWo55k

Abstract concept learning in a simple neural network inspired by the insect brain

The capacity to learn abstract concepts such as 'sameness' and 'difference' is considered a higher-order cognitive function, typically thought to be dependent on top-down neocortical processing. It is therefore surprising that honey bees apparantly have this capacity. Here we report a model of the structures of the honey bee brain that can learn sameness and difference, as well as a range of complex and simple associative learning tasks. Our model is constrained by the known connections and properties of the mushroom body, including the protocerebral tract, and provides a good fit to the learning rates and performances of real bees in all tasks, including learning sameness and difference. The model proposes a novel mechanism for learning the abstract concepts of 'sameness' and 'difference' that is compatible with the insect brain, and is not dependent on top-down or executive control processing

QUANTIFICATION DE L'EFFICACITE DES PRATIQUES DE CONTROLE DES MALADIES DES GRANDES CULTURES EN FRANCE

International audienceAs public opinion is pushing for a reduction in pesticide use, the effectiveness and necessity of current agricultural practices for crop protection is under threat (Durand et al., 2013; Delbos et al., 2014; Duru et al., 2014; Bonaudo et al., 2014). The average yield losses induced by pests and diseases are poorly known due to the high variability of the presence of bio-agressors and the regular appearance of resistance that degrades the effectiveness of treatments (Comins, 1977; Jutsum et al., 1998). In addition, the available estimates are generally maximum and not average losses, estimated by comparing treated and untreated plots. This does not allow the estimation of the impact of pests and diseases not avoided by the treatment. Here, we analyze epidemiological surveillance data for 13 diseases and 12 insects throughout France over a period of 9 years. The pressure of each bio-aggressor is calculated at the departmental level from observations made over the year. Several models are then tested to predict the impact of a group of bio-aggressors on the departmental performance of their target crop. We show that the majority of the pests studied do not have a significant overall impact on yield, suggesting that they are well contained nationally by the different treatments applied to wheat, barley and rapeseed. Septoria tritici (Septoria tritici) and ear aphid (Sitobion avenae) on wheat, as well as bud weevils and silica on rapeseed appear to be the most problematic because they have a significant negative impact in most of the models tested.A l'heure où l'opinion publique pousse à une réduction de l'utilisation des pesticides, l'efficacité et la nécessité des pratiques agricoles actuelles sur la protection des cultures est sur la sellette (Delbos et al., 2014; Duru et al., 2014; Bonaudo et al. 2014). Les pertes de rendement moyennes induites par les bioagresseurs sont mal connues du fait de la grande variabilité de présence des bioagresseurs et de l'apparition régulière de résistances qui dégradent l'efficacité des traitements (Comins, 1977; Jutsum et al., 1998). De plus les estimations disponibles sont généralement des pertes maximales et non moyennes, estimées en comparant des bandes traitées et non - traitées. Cela ne permet pas l'estimation de l'impact des bioagresseurs non évitée par le traitement. Ici, nous analysons des données de suivis d'épidémiosurveillance de 13 maladies et de 12 insectes dans toute la France sur une période de 9 ans. La pression de chaque bio- agresseur est calculée à l'échelle du département à partir des observations faites sur l'année. Plusieurs modèles sont ensuite testés afin de prédire l'impact d'un groupe de bio-agresseurs sur le rendement départemental de leur culture cible. Nous montrons que la majorité des bio-agresseurs étudiés n'a globalement pas d'impact significatif sur le rendement, ce qui suggère qu'ils sont bien contenus à l'échelle nationale par les différents traitements appliqués sur blé, orge et colza. La septoriose (Septoria tritici) et le puceron des épis (Sitobion avenae) sur blé, ainsi que les charançons du bourgeon et des siliques sur colza apparaissent comme les plus problématiques car ayant un impact négatif significatif dans la plupart des modèles testés