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Full-Text Articles in Medical Sciences

A Neurophysiological Investigation Of Listening Effort In Normal Hearing Adults Using Fnirs And Pupillometry, Jessica Defenderfer May 2022

A Neurophysiological Investigation Of Listening Effort In Normal Hearing Adults Using Fnirs And Pupillometry, Jessica Defenderfer

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Real-world conversations are often accompanied by some sort of interference that challenges the clarity of the speaker’s message, causing listeners to exert more effort to understand speech. Previous research has demonstrated that when listening to speech becomes difficult, various regions of the brain are recruited beyond those which engage during optimal listening conditions. However, the neural correlates that underly listening effort are not fully understood. Importantly, the pupillary response can be used to index listening effort, such that pupil size increases with increasing cognitive demand. I proposed that pupillometry can be used to characterize the cortical response, such that changes …


Conditional Loss Of Engrailed 1/2 In Rhombic Lip-Derived Neurons Increases Intrinsic Rhythmicity And Decreases Overall Variability Of Eupneic Respiration, Angela P. Taylor Sep 2020

Conditional Loss Of Engrailed 1/2 In Rhombic Lip-Derived Neurons Increases Intrinsic Rhythmicity And Decreases Overall Variability Of Eupneic Respiration, Angela P. Taylor

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Evidence for a cerebellar role during cardiopulmonary challenges has long been established, but investigation into cerebellar involvement in eupneic breathing has been inconclusive. Given the view of the cerebellum (CRB) as a temporally coordinating structure, any investigation into the CRB during respiration must evaluate rhythm and variability of the respiratory sequence. In this study, we chose an elegant model of cerebellar neuropathology, Atoh1-En1/2 CKO, where mutant animals have conditional loss of the developmental patterning gene Engrailed 1/2 in rhombic lip-lineage neurons and exhibit a proportional scaling-down of neuron number in hypoplastic lobules of the CRB. We utilized whole-body unrestrained plethysmography …


Genomic Instability And The Oncohistone H3k27m Drive Gliomagenesis In A Murine Model, Lee J. Pribyl Sep 2020

Genomic Instability And The Oncohistone H3k27m Drive Gliomagenesis In A Murine Model, Lee J. Pribyl

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Maintaining genome stability is crucial for human health and it is of particular importance in neural cells during early brain development. Genome maintenance occurs at two broad stages; surveillance during DNA replication and DNA damage repair in differentiating and mature cells. Neural cells are particularly sensitive to DNA strand breaks and defective DNA damage responses can result in detrimental effects on the nervous system, including cancer. Multiple DNA repair pathways play critical roles in preventing DNA damage accumulation in stem and neural progenitor cells. The mechanisms that protect progenitor genomes also suppress DNA mutations that can result in cancer. A …