The development of the thalamus was examined in normal and X-irradiated embryos from day 13 (E13) to the day before birth (E22). The differentiating, radioresistant neurons of the lateral habenular nucleus, derived from a portion of the superior neuroepithelial lobule (SL1), were settling by day E15 and by this time the habenulopeduncular tract was forming. The neurons of the reticular nucleus,...

Thalamic intralaminar and medial nuclei participate mainly in affective and motivational aspects of pain processing. Unique to the present study were identification and characterization of spontaneously active neurons in the central lateral nucleus (CL) of the intralaminar thalamus, which were found to respond only to viscerally evoked noxious stimuli in animals under pentobarbital anesthesia. ...

The thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) is a thin layer of GABAergic cells lying rostral and lateral to the dorsal thalamus, and its projection to thalamic relay cells (i.e., the reticulothalamic pathway) strongly inhibits these cells. In an attempt to extend earlier studies of reticulothalamic connections to sensory thalamic nuclei, we used laser-scanning photostimulation to study the reticulotha...

The procedure presented quantitatively assesses thalamic lesions in the chronic phase of an ischemic episode. The structural MR images of 19 patients with ischemia in the thalamus were assessed by radiologic inspection. An independent rater allocated the damage to the thalamic nuclei. The assessments showed 89% accordance with the radiologic inspection (P < .001). This procedure ranks the exten...

Accurate and reliable identification of thalamic nuclei is important for surgical interventions and neuroanatomical studies. This is a challenging task due to their small sizes and low intra-thalamic contrast in standard T1-weighted or T2weighted images. Previously proposed techniques rely on diffusion imaging or functional imaging. These require additional scanning and suffer from the low reso...

Current models of basal ganglia circuitry primarily associate the ventral thalamic nuclei with relaying basal ganglia output to the frontal cortex. However, some studies have demonstrated projections from the ventral anterior (VA) and ventral lateral (VL) thalamic nuclei to the striatum, suggesting that these nuclei directly modulate the striatum. VA/VL nuclei have specific connections with pri...

The binding sites of nociceptin (also named orphanin FQ), the endogenous ligand of ORL1 (opiate receptor like 1), were localized in rat brain, using an autoradiographic procedure. High levels of binding were observed in the cingulate, retrosplenial, perirhinal, insular and occipital cortex, anterior and posteromedial cortical amygdaloid nuclei, basolateral amygdaloid nucleus, amygdaloid complex...

OBJECTIVE Neuroimaging evidence suggested that the thalamic nuclei may play different roles in the progress of idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). This study aimed to demonstrate the alterations in morphometry and functional connectivity in the thalamic nuclei in IGE. METHODS Fifty-two patients with IGE characterized by generalized tonic-clonic seizures and 67 healthy controls were involve...

The anterior thalamic nuclei form part of a network for episodic memory in humans. The importance of these nuclei for recognition and recency judgments remains, however, unclear. Rats with anterior thalamic nuclei lesions and their controls were tested on object recognition, along with two types of recency judgment. The spontaneous discrimination of a novel object or a novel odor from a familia...