PURPOSE Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to identify areas of brain activation during absence seizures in an awake animal model. METHODS Blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI in the brain was measured by using T2*-weighted echo planar imaging at 4.7 Tesla. BOLD imaging was performed before, during, and after absence seizure induction by using gamma-butyrolactone (...

BACKGROUND Epilepsy is one of the most important central nervous system disorder and 1% of the total world population suffers from this disorder which require a chronic drug treatment. Most of the researchers suggested that excessive calcium entry into neurons is the main triggering event in the initiation of epileptic discharges but the role of L type calcium channels has not been clarified in...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether carbamazepine (CBZ) aggravates absence seizures in the low-dose pentylenetetrazol (PTZ) rat model in both male and female animals, and investigate for gender differences. METHODS Inbred Sprague-Dawley rats were implanted with EEG electrodes. Seven days later PTZ (20 mg/kg, i.p.) was administered following pre-treatment with vehicle or CBZ (20 mg/kg, i.p.) and t...

The state of therapeutic ketosis can be achieved by using the ketogenic diet (KD) or exogenous ketone supplementation. It was suggested previously that the adenosinergic system may be involved in the mediating effect of KD on suppressing seizure activity in different types of epilepsies, likely by means of adenosine A1 receptors (A1Rs). Thus, we tested in the present study whether exogenous ket...

Submitted for the MAR09 Meeting of The American Physical Society Gap opening due to topological defects in graphene1 RICARDO NUNES, JOICE ARAÚJO, HELIO CHACHAM, UFMG Brazil — Stone-Wales defects (SWD = two adjacent pentagon-heptagon pairs) are common low-energy defects in carbon nanotubes. Previously, Crespi et al.[PRB, 53, 1996] have proposed a purely-carbon covalent metal sheet called “pentah...

OBJECTIVE The study aims to investigate whether there is a higher excitability in the deep cortical layers of the peri-oral region of the somatosensory cortex as compared to other cortical regions in absence epileptic WAG/Rij rats and whether this is unique for this type of epileptic rats, as would be predicted by the cortical focus theory of absence epilepsy. METHODS Excitability of cortical...

Swoogle is a system that helps knowledge engineers and software agents find knowledge on the web encoded in the semantic web languages RDF and OWL. Based on the search mechanisms provided in the previous version, we propose a novel semantic web navigation model and refine mechanisms for ranking the semantic web at various granularities. Although the semantic web is materialized on the Web, it i...

The applicability of the one-dimensional idealized flux theory (1DFT) for the design of secondary settling tanks (SSTs) is evaluated by comparing its predicted maximum surface overflow (SOR) and solids loading (SLR) rates with that calculated with the two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model SettlerCAD using as a basis 35 full-scale SST stress tests conducted on different SSTs with di...