Depressive symptoms in individuals with overweight and obesity. Results from the LIFE-adult-study.

Background: Prevalences of overweight and obesity are rising worldwide. Comorbidity of depressive symptoms and overweight or obesity are considered as a major public (mental) health issue. The aim was to determine prevalences in a non-treatment seeking population of adults, investigating possible confounders as well as interaction effects.

Cell-specific mechanisms drive connectivity across the time course of Huntington's disease.

Hyperconnectivity in functional brain networks occurs decades before disease onset in Huntington's disease. However, the biological mechanisms remain unknown. We investigate connectivity in Huntington's disease using Morphometric INverse Divergence (MIND) in three Huntington's disease cohorts (N = 512) spanning from two decades before the onset of symptoms through to functional decline.

Characterizing spatiotemporal white matter hyperintensity pathophysiology in vivo to disentangle vascular and neurodegenerative contributions.

White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are neuroimaging markers widely interpreted as caused by cerebral small vessel disease, yet emerging evidence suggests that a subset may have a neurodegenerative etiology. Current imaging methods have lacked the specificity to disentangle biological processes underlying WMHs . Here, we used voxel-level normative modeling and seven microstructural MRI markers with complementary biophysical sensitivities to generate single-subject high-resolution WMH pathophysiology maps in a large cohort (=32,526).

A leadfield-free optimization framework for transcranially applied electric currents.

Background: Transcranial Electrical Stimulation (TES), Temporal Interference Stimulation (TIS), Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) are based on the application of electric current patterns to the brain.

Objective: The optimal electrode positions, shapes and alignments for generating a desired current pattern in the brain vary between persons due to anatomical variability. The aim is to develop a flexible and efficient computational approach to determine individually optimal montages based on electric field simulations.

Orbitofrontal Thickness and Network Associations as Transdiagnostic Signature of Amotivation Along the Bipolar-Schizophrenia Spectrum.

Background And Hypothesis: Negative symptoms of schizophrenia (SCZ), particularly amotivation, are prominent across both SCZ and bipolar disorder (BD). While orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) alterations have been implicated in the development of negative symptoms, their contributions across disorders remain to be established. Here, we examined how OFC thickness and network associations relate to amotivation compared to diminished expression across the BD-SCZ spectrum.

3D MRI Tract-Specific Spinal Cord Lesion Pattern Improves Prediction of Distinct Neurological Recovery.

Objective: To distinguish lateralized motor- and sensory-tract damage after acute spinal cord injury (SCI) and explore its predictive power for motor and sensory recovery.

Methods: Thirty-five SCI patients (two female) from a multi-center data set (placebo-arm of the Nogo-A-Inhibition in SCI trial) underwent routine T2-weighted sagittal MRI scans at the lesion site at baseline (19.9 days, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 17.

Dimensions underlying the representational alignment of deep neural networks with humans.

Determining the similarities and differences between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) is an important goal in both computational cognitive neuroscience and machine learning, promising a deeper understanding of human cognition and safer, more reliable AI systems. Much previous work comparing representations in humans and AI has relied on global, scalar measures to quantify their alignment. However, without explicit hypotheses, these measures only inform us about the degree of alignment, not the factors that determine it.

Safety, Feasibility, and Tolerability of Ten Days of At-Home, Remotely Supervised tDCS During Gamified Attention Training in Children with Acquired Brain Injury: An Open-Label, Dose-Controlled Pilot Trial.

Chronic attention problems occur in approximately 25% of children after acquired brain injury (ABI). When delivered daily, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) may improve attention; however, access to daily in-clinic tDCS treatment can be limited by other commitments, including concurrent therapy, school commitments, and caregiver schedules. Treatment access can be improved through home-based interventions, though these require several practical and safety considerations in a pediatric ABI population.

Effect of corticospinal and reticulospinal tract damage on spastic muscle tone and mobility: a retrospective observational MRI study.

Background: Spastic muscle tone, often observed after spinal cord injury (SCI), is thought to contribute to body support during walking at a lower level of neural organisation. Understanding the link between damage to specific spinal tracts and the development of spastic muscle tone and mobility could enhance our knowledge of the neural structures crucial for recovery of function after SCI.

Methods: In this retrospective observational study, MRI-based assessments of descending spinal tract damage were related to the development of spastic muscle tone and mobility.

Consensus guidelines for the use of concurrent TMS-fMRI in cognitive and clinical neuroscience.

Concurrent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (TMS-fMRI) provides a step-change in the toolkit of neuroscience research. TMS enables the noninvasive perturbation of ongoing human brain activity, and when coupled to fMRI for the simultaneous read-out of its effects across the brain, concurrent TMS-fMRI enables studies aimed at determining the causal inference of human brain-behavior relationships, with implications for both fundamental research and clinical application. Many of the technical barriers to TMS-fMRI implementation, such as hardware design and setups, have now been overcome, and the research community in the field is rapidly growing.

Neural dynamics of visual working memory representation during sensory distraction.

Recent studies have provided evidence for the concurrent encoding of sensory percepts and visual working memory (VWM) contents across visual areas; however, it has remained unclear how these two types of representations are concurrently present. Here, we reanalyzed an open-access fMRI dataset where participants memorized a sensory stimulus while simultaneously being presented with sensory distractors. First, we found that the VWM code in several visual regions did not fully generalize between different time points, suggesting a dynamic code.

Impact of symmetry in local learning rules on predictive neural representations and generalization in spatial navigation.

In spatial cognition, the Successor Representation (SR) from reinforcement learning provides a compelling candidate of how predictive representations are used to encode space. In particular, hippocampal place cells are hypothesized to encode the SR. Here, we investigate how varying the temporal symmetry in learning rules influences those representations.

Pre-stimulus beta power mediates explicit and implicit perceptual biases in distinct cortical areas.

Perception is biased by expectations and previous actions. Pre-stimulus brain oscillations are a potential candidate for implementing biases in the brain. In two EEG studies (43 and 39 participants) on somatosensory near-threshold detection, we investigated the pre-stimulus neural correlates of an (implicit) previous choice bias and an explicit bias.

Modeling Emotional Arousal With Turbulence Measured by EEG.

Turbulence-like dynamics in brain activity have been proposed as a signature of systems operating near criticality, and may reflect changes in neuronal function associated with emotional states. In this paper, we hypothesize that motor behavior linked to emotional expression modulates turbulence, reflecting a shift towards more streamlined brain dynamics characteristic of emotional motor control. We assessed EEG turbulence in 30 healthy participants in a motor paradigm varying in both task demand and degree of emotionality.

High-density MRI coil arrays with integrated field monitoring systems for human connectome mapping.

Purpose: To develop and test two high-density MRI coil arrays with integrated field monitoring systems for enhanced diffusion imaging with strong diffusion-sensitizing gradients.

Methods: Two multichannel head coils were constructed for first- and second-generation 3T Connectome MRI scanners, incorporating 64 and 72 receive channels, respectively. The array coils were evaluated using RF bench-level metrics, including quality factor, tuning, matching, and coupling measurements.

Autism-related shifts in the brain's information processing hierarchy.

Despite considerable research efforts, mechanisms of autism remain incompletely understood. Key challenges in conceptualizing and managing autism include its diverse behavioral and cognitive phenotypes, a lack of reliable biomarkers, and the absence of a framework for integration. This review proposes that alterations in sensory-transmodal brain hierarchy are a system-level mechanism of atypical information processing in autism.

Support or stress? How attachment and relationship dynamics associate with acute psychosocial stress in the presence of the romantic partner.

Stress is a wide-spread phenomenon and associated with various detrimental health effects. A significant resource for stress buffering is social support. How social support is perceived, however, depends on a multitude of individual and interindividual factors.

Subjective, behavioural and physiological correlates of stress in women using hormonal contraceptives.

Background: Stress, a major risk factor for mental health problems, is influenced by hormonal fluctuations from the menstrual cycle and hormonal oral contraceptives (OC). Despite widespread use, the impact of hormonal intrauterine devices (IUDs) on stress is limited to one study.

Aims: This study examines psychoendocrine stress responses in women using IUDs, OCs and women with a natural, regular menstrual cycle (NC) to better understand how endogenous and exogenous hormones influence stress.

Rudolf Nieuwenhuys (11 June 1927-4 November 2024): a scholarly life.

This collective eulogy by colleagues, co-authors and friends is a tribute to the work and life of Rudolf Nieuwenhuys. 'Neurofascination' is an apt label for his scholarly life in the sciences from the start in 1955 until his last days in 2024. In addition, he had a broad interest in Roman and Gothic architecture, the history and politics of the twentieth century, religion and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Functional recruitment and connectivity of the cerebellum is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood.

There is accumulating evidence that the human cerebellum is heavily implicated in adult social cognition. Yet, its involvement in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM), a hallmark of social cognition, remains elusive. Using openly available functional MRI data of children with emerging ToM abilities (N = 41, age range: 3-12 years) and adults (N = 78), we show that children who pass a false-belief assessment of ToM abilities activate cerebellar Crus I-II in response to ToM events during a movie-watching task, similar to adults.

Mechanisms of cultural diversity in urban populations.

Large cities exhibit greater cultural diversity. Due to limited data on individual behaviour, previous research could not discern whether this stems from demographic heterogeneity or enhanced individual cultural exploration. Analysing 250 million listening events from 2.

Adolescent maturation of cortical excitation-inhibition ratio based on individualized biophysical network modeling.

The excitation-inhibition ratio is a key functional property of cortical microcircuits which changes throughout an individual's lifespan. Adolescence is considered a critical period for maturation of excitation-inhibition ratio. This has primarily been observed in animal studies.

Retinal nerve fibre layer thickness reflects characteristics of brain grey and white matter.

The retina is a relatively accessible part of the central nervous system compared to the brain. Using high resolution optical imaging we investigated the relationship between retinal thickness, obtained with optical coherence tomography, and structural features of the brain obtained with magnetic resonance imaging. In a population-based sample of over 500 subjects, we hypothesized: (i) that there are structural associations between circumpapillary retinal nerve fibre layer thickness and brain grey matter density and white matter microstructural properties in visual information processing areas, and specifically contralateral associations for nasal retinal fibers, and (ii) that retinal findings reflect broader changes in brain grey and white matter related to cardiovascular risk factors.