BACKGROUND Patients with migraine are averse to certain visual stimuli, such as flicker and striped patterns that evoke paroxysmal EEG activity in patients with photosensitive epilepsy. Migraineurs demonstrate a hyper-responsiveness to such stimuli, and there is debate as to whether the aversion and hyper-responsiveness are due to a hyperexcitability of the cortex similar to that in patients wi...

Neurons in the mammalian retina expressing the photopigment melanopsin have been identified as a class of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs). This discovery more than a decade ago has opened up an exciting new field of retinal research, and following the initial identification of photosensitive ganglion cells, several subtypes have been described. A number of studies h...

OBJECTIVES Identify the photosensitive drugs included in the hospital pharmacotherapeutic guide and search for stability data on the storage, reconstitution, and dilution of these compounds. METHODS The data were obtained by referencing technical specifications, information provided by drug laboratories, and in some cases, we performed a more extensive bibliographic search (tertiary sources a...

BACKGROUND The pathogenic mechanisms of UV-induced skin lesions of lupus erythematosus (LE) are unknown. In a recent study of pathogenic mechanisms of polymorphic light eruption (PLE), significantly more Langerhans cells (LCs) persisted in the epidermis after UVB overexposure than in healthy individuals. Interestingly, the same phenomenon was observed in one subacute cutaneous lupus erythematos...

PURPOSE To determine the relative contributions of inner and outer retinal photoreception to the pupillary light response. METHODS Wild-type, retinal degenerate (rd/rd), and melanopsin mutant (opn4(-/-)) mice were tested for pupillary light responsiveness by video pupillometry before, during, and after exposure to supersaturating light intensities. Similar lighting protocols were used to prob...

Neurons become photosensitive by genetically introducing one of green algae-derived protein, channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2). Here, we quantitatively investigated the rapidness of the light-gated current of ChR2 expressed in PC12 cells using blue light-emitting diode (LED) light. The light-gated current consists of two components, inactivating and non-inactivating. The magnitude of inactivating compo...

Key words Photosensitive epilepsy Non-verbal and verbal induced epilepsies References Abstract Reflex epilepsies (RE) are rare epileptic syndromes with seizures induced by specific triggering factors (either by visual, auditory, somato-sensitive or somato-motor stimulation, or by higher cortical function activities). Their frequency depends on the type of epilepsies, and can reach 25% for photo...