Neurotoxicology

BACKGROUND: Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a significant health concern characterized by recurrent upper airway blockages during sleep, causing various health issues. There's growing evidence of a link between air pollution and OSA, though research results have been inconsistent. This systematic review and meta-analysis aims to consolidate and examine data on the relationship between air pollution and OSA's risk and severity. METHODS: A literature search across PubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science was conducted until January 10, 2024...

BACKGROUND: Organophosphates and pyrethroids are two major groups of insecticides used for crop protection worldwide. They are neurotoxicants and exposure during vulnerable windows of brain development may have long-term impact on human neurodevelopment. Only few longitudinal studies have investigated associations between prenatal exposure to these substances and intelligence quotient (IQ) at school age in populations with low, mainly dietary, exposure. OBJECTIVE: To investigate associations between maternal urinary concentrations of insecticide metabolites at gestational week 28 and IQ in offspring at 7-years of age...

Neurotoxicological research faces the challenge of linking biological changes resulting from exposures to neuronal function. An additional challenge is understanding cell-type specific differences and selective vulnerabilities of distinct neuronal populations to toxic insults. Single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) allows for measurement of the transcriptome of individual cells. This makes it a valuable tool for validating and characterizing cell types present in multicell type samples in complex tissue or cell culture models, but also for understanding how different cell types respond to toxic insults...

BACKGROUND: Increasing cannabis use among pregnant people and equivocal evidence linking prenatal cannabis exposure to adverse outcomes in offspring highlights the need to understand its potential impact on pregnancy and child outcomes. Assessing cannabis use during pregnancy remains a major challenge with potential influences of stigma on self-report as well as detection limitations of easily collected biological matrices. OBJECTIVE: This descriptive study examined the concordance between self-reported (SR) cannabis use and urine drug screen (UDS) detection of cannabis exposure during the first trimester of pregnancy and characterized concordant and discordant groups for sociodemographic factors, modes of use, secondhand exposure to cannabis and tobacco, and alcohol use and cotinine positivity...

Melamine-tainted products have been found in the market and raised issues about food safety. Recent studies done in rodents and humans demonstrated the toxicities of melamine, especially in causing kidney damage and bladder stone formation. However, very few studies assessed its behavior toxicity in organisms, including fish. Therefore, in this study, the researchers aim to determine whether sub-chronic exposure to melamine via oral and systematic administration could induce behavioral abnormality in zebrafish...

BACKGROUND: Propofol can increase neurotoxicity in infants but the precise mechanism is still unknown. Our previous study revealed that nuclear FMR1 interacting protein 1 (NUFIP1), a specific ribophagy receptor, can alleviate T cell apoptosis in sepsis. Yet, the effect of NUFIP1-engineered exosomes elicited from human umbilical cord blood mesenchymal stem cells (hUMSCs) on nerve injury induced by propofol remains unclear. This study intended to investigate the effect of NUFIP1-engineered exosomes on propofol-induced nerve damage in neonatal rats...

Exposure to pesticides, such as carbamates, organophosphates, organochlorines and pyrethroids, has been linked to various health problems, including neurotoxicity. Although most in vivo studies use only male rodents, some studies have shown in vivo sex-specific effects after acute exposure. Since in vivo studies are costly and require a large number of animals, in vitro assays that take sex-specific effects into account are urgently needed. We therefore assessed the acute effects of exposure to different carbamates (methomyl, aldicarb and carbaryl), organophosphates (chlorpyrifos (CPF), chlorpyrifos-oxon (CPO) and 3,5,6-trichloropyridinol), organochlorines (endosulfan, dieldrin and lindane) and pyrethroids (permethrin, alpha-cypermethrin and 3-phenoxy-benzoic acid (3-PBA)) on neuronal network function in sex-separated rat primary cortical cultures using micro-electrode array (MEA) recordings...

Mercury is a toxic pollutant that poses risks to both human and environmental health, making it a pressing public health concern. This study aimed to summarize the knowledge on mercury toxicology and the biological impairments caused by exposure to mercury in experimental studies and/or diagnosis in humans. The research was conducted on the main collection of Web of Science, employing as a methodological tool a bibliometric analysis. The selected articles were analyzed, and extracted data such as publication year, journal, author, title, number of citations, corresponding author's country, keywords, and the knowledge mapping was performed about the type of study, chemical form of mercury, exposure period, origin of exposure, tissue/fluid of exposure measurement, mercury concentration, evaluation period (age), mercury effect, model experiments, dose, exposure pathway, and time of exposure...

BACKGROUND: Manganese (Mn) is an essential micronutrient as well as a well-established neurotoxicant. Occupational and environmental exposures may bypass homeostatic regulation and lead to increased systemic Mn levels. Translocation of ultrafine ambient airborne particles via nasal neuronal pathway to olfactory bulb and tract may be an important pathway by which Mn enters the central nervous system. OBJECTIVE: To measure olfactory tract/bulb tissue metal concentrations in Mn-exposed and non-exposed mineworkers...

Fluorene-9-bisphenol (BHPF) is widely used in the manufacture of plastic products and potentially disrupts several physiological processes, but its biological effects on social behavior remain unknown. In this study, we investigated the effects of BHPF exposure on anxiety-like and social behavior in female mice and the potential mechanisms, thereby proposing a potential therapy strategy. We exposed female Balb/c mice to BHPF by oral gavage at different doses (0.5, 50 mg/kg bw/2-day) for 28 days, which were found BHPF (50 mg/kg) exposure affected motor activity in the open field test (OFT) and elevated cross maze (EPM), resulting in anxiety-like behaviors, as well as abnormal social behavioral deficits in the Social Interaction Test (SIT)...

Bisphenol F (BPF) and Bisphenol S (BPS) are being widely used by the industry with the claim of "safer substances", even with the scarcity of toxicological studies. Given the etiological gap of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the environment may be a causal factor, so we investigated whether exposure to BPF and BPS during the developmental period can induce ASD-like modeling in adult flies. Drosophila melanogaster flies were exposed during development (embryonic and larval period) to concentrations of 0.25, 0...

Developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) is not routinely evaluated in chemical risk assessment because current test paradigms for DNT require the use of mammalian models which are ethically controversial, expensive, and resource demanding. Consequently, efforts have focused on revolutionizing DNT testing through affordable novel alternative methods for risk assessment. The goal is to develop a DNT in vitro test battery amenable to high-throughput screening (HTS). Currently, the DNT in vitro test battery consists primarily of human cell-based assays because of their immediate relevance to human health...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Aspartame (APM) is one of the most widely used artificial sweeteners worldwide. Studies have revealed that consuming APM may negatively affect the body, causing oxidative stress damage to multiple organs and leading to various neurophysiological symptoms. However, it's still unclear if consuming APM and one's daily biological rhythm have an interactive effect on health. In this study, healthy adult C57BL/6 mice were randomly divided into four groups: Control group (CON), oral gavage sham group (OGS), daytime APM intragastric group (DAI) and nighttime APM intragastric group (NAI)...

Prenatal exposure to alcohol or cannabinoids can produce enduring neurobiological, cognitive, and behavioral changes in the offspring. Furthermore, prenatal co-exposure to alcohol and cannabinoids induces malformations in brain regions associated with reward and stress-related circuitry. This study examined the effects of co-exposure to alcohol and the synthetic cannabinoid (SCB) CP55,940 throughout gastrulation and neurulation in rats on basal corticosterone levels and a battery of behavioral tests during adolescence and alcohol self-administration in adulthood...

The synthetic cathinones are man-made compounds derived from the naturally occurring drug cathinone, which is found in the khat plant. The drugs in this pharmacological class that will be the focus of this chapter include mephedrone, MDPV, methcathinone and methylone. These drugs are colloquially known as "bath salts". This misnomer suggests that these drugs are used for health improvement or that they have legitimate medical uses. The synthetic cathinones are dangerous drugs with powerful pharmacological effects that include high abuse potential, hyperthermia and hyperlocomotion...

Although overexposure to manganese (Mn) is known to cause neurotoxic damage, effective exposure markers for assessing Mn loading in Mn-exposed workers are lacking. Here, we construct a Mn-exposed rat model to perform correlation analysis between Mn-induced neurological damage and Mn levels in various biological samples. We combine this analysis with epidemiological investigation to assess whether Mn concentrations in red blood cells (MnRBCs) and urine (MnU) can be used as valid exposure markers. The results show that Mn exposure resulted in neurotoxic damage in rats and that MnRBCs correlated well with neurological damage, showing potential as a novel Mn exposure biomarker...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the association between prenatal cannabis use and structural birth defects in exposed offspring. METHODS: In line with the preregistered protocol (PROSPERO: CRD42022368623), we systematically searched PubMed/Medline, CINHAL, EMBASE, Web of Science, ProQuest, Psych-Info, and Google Scholar for published articles until 25 January 2024. The methodological quality of the included studies was appraised by the Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale (NOS)...

It has been shown that exposure to hexavalent Chromium, Cr (Ⅵ), via nasal cavity can have neurotoxicological effects and induces behavioral impairment due to the fact that blood brain barrier (BBB) does not cover olfactory bulb. But whether Cr (Ⅵ) can cross the BBB and have a toxicological effects in central nervous system (CNS) remains unclear. Therefore, we investigated the effects of Cr (Ⅵ) on mice treated with different concentrations and exposure time (14 days and 28 days) of Cr (Ⅵ) via intraperitoneal injection...

INTRODUCTION: Tacrolimus-associated neurotoxicity (TAN) manifests with wide clinical spectrum, ranging from mild tremors to severe encephalopathy. The isolated involvement of the brainstem is a rarely documented presentation of TAN, and its clinical and diagnostic characteristics are unclear. METHODS: We report two cases of brainstem-isolated TAN (bi-TAN). Moreover, we performed a systematic review of the literature on bi-TAN and extracted data concerning demographics, clinical characteristics, radiological features, and management...