The plasticity found in ongoing and evoked activity was inhibited by pregabalin. “
“Alzheimer’s selleck inhibitor disease (AD) is a disorder of progressive memory loss and executive dysfunction. Little is known about the progression from amnestic mild cognitive impairment

(aMCI; isolated memory loss) to AD. Studies have found impairments in mild-stage AD and aMCI in specific tests of executive function. Here, we used objective saccade tasks to determine if they can effectively assess executive function deficits otherwise assessed by neuropsychological testing. To determine which executive function deficits the saccade tasks are most sensitive to, we also investigated the relationship between performance on saccade tasks and neuropsychological HDAC phosphorylation test scores. Twenty-two aMCI patients (63–90 years), 24 mild AD patients (61–87 years) and 76 healthy controls (60–85 years) performed a battery of neuropsychological tests, and two saccade tasks designed to probe sensory, motor and cognitive function. The prosaccade task requires a fast, automatic saccade toward an eccentric visual stimulus. The antisaccade task requires additional executive processing to inhibit the automatic prosaccade toward the stimulus, so that a voluntary saccade

can be initiated to a location opposite the stimulus. Antisaccade performance was impaired similarly in aMCI and AD patients relative to controls; both groups were slower to initiate correct antisaccades and they made more direction PAK6 errors (erroneous prosaccades), suggesting similar brain deficits. Scores on the Stroop task were inversely correlated with the percentage of short-latency direction errors in the antisaccade task for controls and aMCI patients, whereas other more global measures of executive function were not related to saccade measures in any subject group. Our results show that the antisaccade task is useful for detecting executive dysfunction

in aMCI and AD, especially dysfunction in selective attention. Saccade tasks may therefore have potential to assess executive dysfunction when use of neuropsychological tests is not possible. “
“Complex movements require the interplay of local activation and interareal communication of sensorimotor brain regions. This is reflected in a decrease of task-related spectral power over the sensorimotor cortices and an increase in functional connectivity predominantly in the upper alpha band in the electroencephalogram (EEG). In the present study, directionality of information flow was investigated using EEG recordings to gain better understanding about the network architecture underlying the performance of complex sequential finger movements. This was assessed by means of Granger causality-derived directed transfer function (DTF).