OBJECTIVE To assess speech abilities in adolescents born preterm and investigate whether there is an association between specific speech deficits and brain abnormalities. STUDY DESIGN Fifty adolescents born prematurely (<33 weeks' gestation) with a spectrum of brain injuries were recruited (mean age, 16 years). Speech examination included tests of speech-sound processing and production and sp...

BACKGROUND: Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring is an obligatory tool during fossa posterior surgery. Corticobulbar motor evoked potentials the modality of intraoperative monitoring, which can be used such neurosurgery interventions. It to determine functional state caudal cranial nerves However, there are technical features this modality, therefore, corticobulbar not routine in now.&#...

BACKGROUND Neuroimaging studies of chronic smokers report altered activity of several neural regions involved in the processing of rewarding outcomes. Neuroanatomical evidence suggests that these regions are directly connected to the tongue muscle through the corticobulbar pathways. Accordingly, we examined whether corticobulbar excitability might be considered a somatic marker for nicotine cra...

The promotion of post-ischaemic motor recovery remains a major challenge in clinical neurology. Recently, plasticity-promoting effects have been described for the growth factor erythropoietin in animal models of neurodegenerative diseases. To elucidate erythropoietin's effects in the post-acute ischaemic brain, we examined how this growth factor influences functional neurological recovery, peri...

Two patients are reported with contralateral hemiparesis including a face of supranuclear type, caused by an infarct of the unilateral ventromedial part of the upper medulla. Data from these patients support the hypothesis that part of the corticobulbar fibres supplying the lower facial muscles descend ipsilaterally in the ventromedial part of the upper medulla and then, after decussation, asce...

Like most of the cranial muscles involved in speech, the trigeminally innervated anterior digastric muscles are controlled by descending corticobulbar projections from the primary motor cortex (M1) of each hemisphere. We hypothesized that changes in corticobulbar M1 excitability during speech production would show a hemispheric asymmetry favoring the left side, which is the dominant hemisphere ...

UNLABELLED Both limb and cranial motor functions are adversely impacted by Parkinson's disease (PD). While current pharmacological and surgical interventions are effective in alleviating general limb motor symptoms of PD, they have failed to provide significant benefit for cranial motor functions. This suggests that the neuropathologies mediating limb and cranial motor impairments in PD may dif...

Feedback is a ubiquitous anatomical feature of sensory processing in vertebrates. In this issue of Neuron, two papers (Boyd et al., 2012, and Markopoulos et al., 2012) analyze the features of feedback from olfactory cortex to olfactory bulb.