Rats near term of pregnancy have an attenuated febrile response to intracerebroventricular (ICV) injection of prostaglandin E1 (PGE1) when they are studied at an ambient temperature below their thermoneutral zone. Given that nonshivering thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue is impaired in rodents near term of pregnancy, it is possible that the attenuated febrile response is forced by impairmen...

Central angiotensin II (ANG II) regulates thirst. Because thromboxane A2-prostaglandin H2 (TP) receptors are expressed in the brain and mediate some of the effects of ANG II in the vasculature, we investigated the hypothesis that TP receptors mediate the drinking response to intracerebroventricular (icv) injections of ANG II. Pretreatment with the specific TP-receptor antagonist ifetroban (Ifet...

For many procedures used in behavioral pharmacology, the intracerebroventricular (ICV) route of drug administration is infrequently used due, in part, to the lack of a reliable technique for determining cannula patency in vivo. This study describes an in vivo technique for assessing ICV cannula patency in pigeons. The technique was applied in an experiment designed to evaluate several drugs, wh...

BACKGROUND cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) signaling pathways are involved in the regulation of ethanol-induced sedative effects in knockout mouse models. In the present study, we examined the role of PKA on the behavioral action caused by ethanol in Sprague Dawley rats. METHODS A loss of righting reflex (LORR) test was used to study the acute sedative effects of intraperitoneally injecte...

The intracerebroventricular (icv) application of streptozotocin (STZ) in low dosage was used in 3-month-old rats to explore brain insulin system dysfunction. Three months following STZ icv treatment, the expression of insulin-1 and -2 mRNA was significantly reduced to 11% in hippocampus and to 28% in frontoparietal cerebral cortex, respectively. Insulin receptor (IR) mRNA expression decreased s...

The accumulation and aggregation of misfolded proteins in the brain, such as amyloid-β (Aβ) and hyperphosphorylated tau, is a neuropathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Previously, we developed and validated a novel non-human primate model for sporadic AD (sAD) research using intracerebroventricular administration of streptozotocin (icv STZ). To date, no characterization of AD-rela...

Glucose intolerance in type 2 diabetes is related to enhanced hepatic glucose production (HGP) due to the increased expression of hepatic gluconeogenic enzymes. Previously, we revealed that hepatic STAT3 decreases the expression of hepatic gluconeogenic enzymes and suppresses HGP. Here, we show that increased plasma histidine results in hepatic STAT3 activation. Intravenous and intracerebrovent...

Automatic and accurate methods to estimate normalized regional brain volumes from MRI data are valuable tools which may help to obtain an objective diagnosis and followup of many neurological diseases. To estimate such regional brain volumes, the intracranial cavity volume (ICV) is often used for normalization. However, the high variability of brain shape and size due to normal intersubject var...

We examined the effects of intracerebroventricular (icv) administration of neuromedin U (NMU) on plasma arginine vasopressin (AVP), oxytocin (OXT), and ACTH in rats, using RIA. The induction of c-fos protein (Fos) was examined by immunohistochemical study, and in situ hybridization histochemistry was used to detect c-fos gene expression in the paraventricular (PVN) and supraoptic nuclei (SON). ...

This paper presents a study of gender differences in adult human cerebral cortical folding patterns. The study employs a new multivariate statistical descriptor for analyzing folding patterns in a region of interest (ROI) and a rigorous nonparametric permutation-based scheme for hypothesis testing. Unlike typical ROI-based methods that summarize folding complexity or shape by single/few numbers...