NeuroRx : the Journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Over the past decade, community neurorehabilitation has emerged as a promising extension of neurological rehabilitation. The goal of community neurorehabilitation is to maximize functional ability and quality of life through multidimensional rehabilitation that occurs while the individual is living in a home versus acute or transitory care setting. Because of its multidisciplinary focus, many variations of community neurorehabilitation teams have been implemented. Critical gaps exist, however, in understanding of the influence of structural and procedural differences among programs, as well as patient level variables such as social support, on recovery...

Most patients who survive a stroke experience some degree of physical recovery. Selecting the appropriate outcome measure to assess physical recovery is a difficult task, given the heterogeneity of stroke etiology, symptoms, severity, and even recovery itself. Despite these complexities, a number of strategies can facilitate the selection of functional outcome measures in stroke clinical trial research and practice. Clinical relevance in stroke outcome measures can be optimized by incorporating a framework of health and disability, such as the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF)...

Select functional outcome tests commonly used for evaluating sensorimotor and cognitive capacity in rodents with focal intracerebral ischemic or hemorrhagic injury are described, along with upgrades and issues of concern for translational research. An emphasis is placed on careful quantitative and qualitative assessment of acute and long-term behavioral deficits, and on avoidance of frequent pitfalls. Methods for detecting different degrees of injury and treatment-related improvements are included. Determining the true potential of an intervention requires a set of behavioral analyses that can monitor compensatory learning...

Two-photon microscopy (TPM) has become an increasingly important tool for imaging the structure and function of brain cells in living animals. TPM imaging studies of neuronal structures over intervals ranging from seconds to years have begun to provide important insights into the structural plasticity of synapses and the modulating effects of experience in the intact brain. TPM has also started to reveal how neuronal connections are altered in animal models of neurodegeneration, acute brain injury, and cerebrovascular disease...

Most patients show improvement in the weeks or months after a stroke. Recovery is incomplete, however, leaving most with significant impairment and disability. Because the brain does not grow back to an appreciable extent, this recovery occurs on the basis of change in function of surviving tissues. Brain mapping studies have characterized a number of processes and principles relevant to recovery from stroke in humans. The findings have potential application to improving therapeutics that aim to restore function after stroke...

Stroke is a common disorder that produces a major burden to society, largely through long-lasting motor disability in survivors. Recent studies have broadened our understanding of the processes underlying recovery of motor function after stroke. Bilateral motor regions of the brain experience substantial reorganization after stroke, including changes in the strength of interhemispheric inhibitory interactions. Our understanding of the extent to which different forms of reorganization contribute to behavioral gains in the rehabilitative process, although still limited, has led to the formulation of novel interventional strategies to regain motor function...

There is a compelling need to develop cell and pharmacological therapeutic approaches to be administered beyond the hyperacute phase of stroke. These therapies capitalize on the capacity of the brain for neuroregeneration and neuroplasticity and are designed to reduce neurological deficits after stroke. This review provides an update of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and select pharmacological agents in clinical use for other indications that promote the recovery process in the subacute and chronic phases after stroke...

Current options for the treatment of stroke are extremely limited, partly because of the rapidity with which brain cells die when deprived of their blood supply. Several recent studies suggest that growth factors can produce improvement in animal models of stroke, even when administered at postischemic intervals of many hours to days, when conventional neuroprotective approaches are typically futile. Several growth factors can access the brain after systemic administration, making them more attractive as therapeutic agents...

There are complex relationships among behavioral experience, brain morphology, and functional recovery of an animal before and after brain injury. A large series of experimental studies have shown that exogenous manipulation of central neurotransmitter levels can directly affect plastic changes in the brain and can modulate the effects of experience and training. These complex relationships provide a formidable challenge for studies aimed at understanding neurotransmitter effects on the recovery process. Experiments delineating norepinephrine-modulated locomotor recovery after injury to the cerebral cortex illustrate the close relationships among neurotransmitter levels, brain plasticity, and behavioral recovery...

Stroke is a leading cause of disability that results not only in persistent neurological deficits, but also profound physical deconditioning that propagates disability and worsens cardiovascular risk. The potential for exercise-mediated adaptations to improve function, fitness, and cardiovascular health after stroke has been underestimated: it represents an emerging arena in neurotherapeutics. To define the health rationale for cardiovascular (aerobic) exercise, we first outline the impact of debilitating secondary biological changes in muscle and body composition on fitness and metabolic health after stroke...

Therapeutic activity is a mainstay of clinical neurorehabilitation, but is typically unstructured and directed at compensation rather than restoration of central nervous system function. Newer activity-based therapies (ABTs) are in early stages of development and testing. The ABTs attempt to restore function via standardized therapeutic activity based on principles of experimental psychology, exercise physiology, and neuroscience. Three of the best developed ABTs are constraint-induced therapy, robotic therapy directed at the hemiplegic arm, and treadmill training techniques aimed at improving gait in persons with stroke and spinal cord injury...

Over the past 20 years, evidence has mounted regarding the capacity of the central nervous system to alter its structure and function throughout life. Injury to the central nervous system appears to be a particularly potent trigger for plastic mechanisms to be elicited. Following focal injury, widespread neurophysiological and neuroanatomical changes occur both in the peri-infarct region, as well as throughout the ipsi- and contralesional cortex, in a complex, time-dependent cascade. Since such post-injury plasticity can be both adaptive or maladaptive, current research is directed at understanding how plasticity may be modulated to develop more effective therapeutic interventions for neurological disorders, such as stroke...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Down syndrome (DS) is caused by trisomy of chromosome 21. All individuals with DS exhibit some level of cognitive dysfunction. It is generally accepted that these abnormalities are a result of the upregulation of genes encoded by chromosome 21. Many chromosome 21 proteins are known or predicted to function in critical neurological processes, but typically they function as modulators of these processes, not as key regulators. Thus, upregulation in DS is expected to cause only modest perturbations of normal processes...

The role of the correlation structure of gene expression data are two-fold: It is a source of complications and useful information at the same time. Ignoring the strong stochastic dependence between gene expression levels in statistical methodologies for microarray data analysis may deteriorate their performance. However, there is a host of valuable information in the correlation structure that deserves a closer look. A proper use of correlation measures can remedy deficiencies of currently practiced methods that are focused too heavily on strong effects in terms of differential expression of genes...

Despite advances in microarray technology that have led to increased reproducibility and substantial reductions in the cost of microarrays, the successful use of this technology is still elusive for many researchers, and microarray data analysis in particular presents a substantial bottleneck for many biomedical researchers. There are many reasons for this, including the expense of and a lack of adequate training in the use of analysis software. An additional reason is that microarray data analysis has largely been treated in the past as a set of separate steps, with the majority of emphasis being placed on statistical analysis and visualization of the data...

Advances in postgenomic technologies have radically changed the information output from complex biological systems, generating vast amounts of high complexity data that can be interpreted by means of chemometric and bioinformatic methods to achieve disease diagnosis and prognosis. High-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of biofluids such as plasma, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and urine can generate robust, interpretable metabolic fingerprints that contain latent information relating to physiological or pathological status...