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Autonomic nerve dysfunction is a common non-motor symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD). It has a high incidence and involves multiple organ system disorders with various manifestations, seriously affecting the quality of life. Autonomic nerve dysfunction can be a major symptom of advanced PD and a major cause of disability. Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) is an effective treatment for advanced PD, and its improvement of motor symptoms in PD patients has been widely recognized. However, the effect of STN - DBS on the symptoms of autonomic nerve dysfunction in PD patients is still unclear. Here, the efficacy of STN - DBS on PD autonomic nerve dysfunction is briefly reviewed. Therefore, we should pay more attention to the symptoms of autonomic nerve dysfunction in PD patients, and conduct preoperative evaluation of DBS in PD patients, so as to comprehensively consider the postoperative efficacy, target selection, stimulus parameter setting, drug adjustment, develop an individualized treatment plan.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been widely used for Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, dystonia, drug - resistant epilepsy and other diseases. The operation procedure of this surgical method is complicated, and it also has certain complications in clinical application, including surgical complications such as intracranial hemorrhage and infection, hardware complications such as lead fracture and displacement, and stimulation complications such as paresthesia and muscle spasm, in which lead fracture and erosion and infection of the skin behind the ear are common and troublesome complications. In clinical practice, we found that lead fracture and erosion and infection of the skin were mainly located behind the ear. Since 2012, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University had applied the retroauricular bone grinding groove technology in DBS, which significantly reduced the incidence of lead fracture and erosion and infection of the skin. Therefore, the retroauricular bone grinding groove technology can effectively solve the above problems. This paper mainly introduces the retroauricular bone grinding groove technology and the clinical application attention matters, providing references for colleagues.

Stroke can lead to long - term motor disorders and reduced quality of life. Despite advances in conventional rehabilitation, many patients are still faced with limited efficacy of rehabilitation. Neuromodulation techniques have shown breakthrough therapeutic potential. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the mechanism of poststroke neuroplasticity, to explore the mechanism of dentate nucleus deep brain stimulation (DN - DBS) to improve poststroke motor function, and to summarize the progress of the study, in order to provide a scientific basis and a new therapeutic perspective for clinical practice of DN-DBS.

Identification of odor compounds in fresh sea buckthorn juice (FSBJ) and pulp (SBP) was performed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry-olfactometry (GC-MS-O). A total of 39 and 36 odor compounds were identified in FSBJ and SBP, respectively. Further findings revealed that ethyl hexanoate, ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, ethyl 3-methylbutyrate, and 3-methylbutyl 3-methylbutanoate had high flavor dilution (FD) factors and were identified as the key odor compounds in FSBJ. In addition, the contents of ester compounds contributing to the fruity odor were significantly reduced in SBP after pasteurization. Sensory evaluation and electronic tongue analysis revealed that the sweetness and overall taste of SBP were superior to those of FSBJ. The contents of vitamin C and total flavonoids were significantly lower in SBP than in FSBJ, indicating that pasteurization reduces the nutritional quality of FSBJ. The results of the study can provide theoretical references for the flavor and nutritional quality optimization of sea buckthorn products.

After decades of effort by shareholders, including government agencies, patient advocacy groups, and professional organizations, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) established a new medical device category for over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids on October 17, 2022. This FDA regulation allows adults aged 18 years or older with perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss to purchase OTC hearing aids without a prescription or even a hearing test. The goal is to increase hearing aid accessibility, potentially leading to improved hearing and a better quality of life. In our analysis of the FDA Establishment Registration & Device Listing database, we found that the current OTC hearing aid market is still dominated by traditional hearing aid manufacturers, with limited disruptor from major consumer electronics and startup companies. Our technological analyses showed that the relatively high-level output specification without gain limitation allows sufficient amplification even for people with severe-to-profound hearing loss. Additionally, borrowing from the cochlear implant mapping strategy, we propose novel amplification algorithms for fitting OTC hearing aids without an audiogram. We argue that smartphones and true-wireless-stereo earbuds can functionally serve as OTC hearing aids, further increasing accessibility and affordability while reducing the stigma associated with hearing aids, especially in low- and mid-income countries. By treating more people at a younger age with less hearing loss than traditional prescription hearing aids, OTC hearing aids can potentially have a significant impact beyond hearing care, such as delaying or preventing cognitive decline in the elderly.

IntroductionObjectively predicting speech intelligibility is important in both telecommunication and human-machine interaction systems. The classic method relies on signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) to successfully predict speech intelligibility. One exception is clear speech, in which a talker intentionally articulates as if speaking to someone who has hearing loss or is from a different language background. As a result, at the same SNR, clear speech produces higher intelligibility than conversational speech. Despite numerous efforts, no objective metric can successfully predict the clear speech benefit at the sentence level.MethodsWe proposed a Syllable-Rate-Adjusted-Modulation (SRAM) index to predict the intelligibility of clear and conversational speech. The SRAM used as short as 1 s speech and estimated its modulation power above the syllable rate. We compared SRAM with three reference metrics: envelope-regression-based speech transmission index (ER-STI), hearing-aid speech perception index version 2 (HASPI-v2) and short-time objective intelligibility (STOI), and five automatic speech recognition systems: Amazon Transcribe, Microsoft Azure Speech-To-Text, Google Speech-To-Text, wav2vec2 and Whisper.ResultsSRAM outperformed the three reference metrics (ER-STI, HASPI-v2 and STOI) and the five automatic speech recognition systems. Additionally, we demonstrated the important role of syllable rate in predicting speech intelligibility by comparing SRAM with the total modulation power (TMP) that was not adjusted by the syllable rate.DiscussionSRAM can potentially help understand the characteristics of clear speech, screen speech materials with high intelligibility, and convert conversational speech into clear speech.

Abstract Impaired activation and regulation of the extinction of inflammatory cells and molecules in injured neuronal tissues are key factors in the development of epilepsy. SerpinA3N is mainly associated with the acute phase response and inflammatory response. In our current study, transcriptomics analysis, proteomics analysis, and Western blotting showed that the expression level of Serpin clade A member 3N (SerpinA3N) is significantly increased in the hippocampus of mice with kainic acid (KA)-induced temporal lobe epilepsy, and this molecule is mainly expressed in astrocytes. Notably, in vivo studies using gain- and loss-of-function approaches revealed that SerpinA3N in astrocytes promoted the release of proinflammatory factors and aggravated seizures. Mechanistically, RNA sequencing and Western blotting showed that SerpinA3N promoted KA-induced neuroinflammation by activating the NF-κB signaling pathway. In addition, co-immunoprecipitation revealed that SerpinA3N interacts with ryanodine receptor type 2 (RYR2) and promotes RYR2 phosphorylation. Overall, our study reveals a novel SerpinA3N-mediated mechanism in seizure-induced neuroinflammation and provides a new target for developing neuroinflammation-based strategies to reduce seizure-induced brain injury.

Attention plays an important role in not only the awareness and perception of tinnitus but also its interactions with external sounds. Recent evidence suggests that attention is heightened in the tinnitus brain, likely as a result of relatively local cortical changes specific to deafferentation sites or global changes that help maintain normal cognitive capabilities in individuals with hearing loss. However, most electrophysiological studies have used passive listening paradigms to probe the tinnitus brain and produced mixed results in terms of finding a distinctive biomarker for tinnitus. Here, we designed a selective attention task, in which human adults attended to one of two interleaved tonal (500 Hz and 5 kHz) sequences. In total, 16 tinnitus (5 females) and 13 age- and hearing-matched control (8 females) subjects participated in the study, with the tinnitus subjects matching the tinnitus pitch to 5.4 kHz (range = 1.9–10.8 kHz). Cortical responses were recorded in both passive and attentive listening conditions, producing no differences in P1, N1, and P2 between the tinnitus and control subjects under any conditions. However, a different pattern of results emerged when the difference was examined between the attended and unattended responses. This attention-modulated cortical response was significantly greater in the tinnitus than control subjects: 3.9-times greater for N1 at 5 kHz (95% CI: 2.9 to 5.0, p = 0.007, ηp2 = 0.24) and 3.0 for P2 at 500 Hz (95% CI: 1.9 to 4.5, p = 0.026, ηp2 = 0.17). We interpreted the greater N1 modulation as local neural changes specific to the tinnitus frequency and the greater P2 as global changes to hearing loss. These two cortical measures were used to differentiate between the tinnitus and control subjects, producing 83.3% sensitivity and 76.9% specificity (AUC = 0.81, p = 0.006). These results suggest that the tinnitus brain is more plastic than that of the matched non-tinnitus controls and that the attention-modulated cortical response can be developed as a clinically meaningful biomarker for tinnitus.

This study explores the potential of laser-induced nano-photon-poration as a non-invasive technique for the intracellular delivery of micro/macromolecules at the single-cell level. This research proposes the utilization of gold-coated spiky polymeric nanoparticles (Au-PNPs) and gold nanorods (GNRs) to achieve efficient intracellular micro/macromolecule delivery at the single-cell level. By shifting the operating wavelength towards the near-infrared (NIR) range, the intracellular delivery efficiency and viability of Au-PNP-mediated photon-poration are compared to those using GNR-mediated intracellular delivery. Employing Au-PNPs as mediators in conjunction with nanosecond-pulsed lasers, a highly efficient intracellular delivery, while preserving high cell viability, is demonstrated. Laser pulses directed at Au-PNPs generate over a hundred hot spots per particle through plasmon resonance, facilitating the formation of photothermal vapor nanobubbles (PVNBs). These PVNBs create transient pores, enabling the gentle transfer of cargo from the extracellular to the intracellular milieu, without inducing deleterious effects in the cells. The optimization of wavelengths in the NIR region, coupled with low laser fluence (27 mJ/cm2) and nanoparticle concentrations (34 µg/mL), achieves outstanding delivery efficiencies (96%) and maintains high cell viability (up to 99%) across the various cell types, including cancer and neuronal cells. Importantly, sustained high cell viability (90–95%) is observed even 48 h post laser exposure. This innovative development holds considerable promise for diverse applications, encompassing drug delivery, gene therapy, and regenerative medicine. This study underscores the efficiency and versatility of the proposed technique, positioning it as a valuable tool for advancing intracellular delivery strategies in biomedical applications.