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Introduction Pre-eclampsia is a hypertensive disorder affecting up to 8% of pregnancies. After pre-eclampsia, women are at increased risk of cognitive problems, and cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disorders. These sequelae could result from microvascular dysfunction persisting after pre-eclampsia. This study will explore differences in cerebral and myocardial microvascular function between women after pre-eclampsia and women after normotensive gestation. We hypothesise that pre-eclampsia alters cerebral and myocardial microvascular functions, which in turn are related to diminished cognitive and cardiac performance. Methods and analysis The cross-sectional € DEcreased Cognitive functiON, NEurovascular CorrelaTes and myocardial changes in women with a history of pre-eclampsia' (DECONNECT) pilot study includes women after pre-eclampsia and controls after normotensive pregnancy between 6 months and 20 years after gestation. We recruit women from the Queen of Hearts study, a study investigating subclinical heart failure after pre-eclampsia. Neuropsychological tests are employed to assess different cognitive domains, including attention, processing speed, and cognitive control. Cerebral images are recorded using a 7 Tesla MRI to assess blood-brain barrier integrity, perfusion, blood flow, functional and structural networks, and anatomical dimensions. Cardiac images are recorded using a 3 Tesla MRI to assess cardiac perfusion, strain, dimensions, mass, and degree of fibrosis. We assess the effect of a history of pre-eclampsia using multivariable regression analyses. Ethics and dissemination This study is approved by the Ethics Committee of Maastricht University Medical Centre (METC azM/UM, NL47252.068.14). Knowledge dissemination will include scientific publications, presentations at conferences and public forums, and social media. Trial registration number NCT02347540.

Aims: To measure brain activity in patients with bruxism and temporomandibular disorder ( TMD)-related pain in comparison to controls using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and to investigate whether modulations in jaw clenching led to different pain reports and/or changes in neural activity in motor and pain processing areas within and between both groups. Methods: A total of 40 participants (21 patients with bruxism and TMD-related pain and 19 healthy controls) performed a tooth-clenching task while lying inside a 3T MRI scanner. Participants were instructed to mildly or strongly clench their teeth for brief periods of 12 seconds and to subsequently rate their clenching intensity and pain experience after each clenching period. Results: Patients reported significantly more pain during strong clenching compared to mild clenching. Further results showed significant differences between patients and controls in activity in areas of brain networks commonly associated with pain processing, which were also correlated with reported pain intensity. There was no evidence for differences in activity in motor-related areas between groups, which contrasts with findings of previous research. Conclusions: Brain activity in patients with bruxism and TMD-related pain is correlated more with pain processing than with motoric differences.

Temporal memory about when in the past something happened is suggested to be reconstructed rather than recalled. Participants usually show a degree of mismatch between remembered and actual temporal position of an event. However, recent studies showed markedly different results, including both relatively low temporal precision, for visual objects presented earlier in a series, and relatively high temporal precision, for movie scenes shown at the start of a movie. One explanation could be the use of different stimulus materials, for which participants would employ different cognitive encoding or mnemonic strategies. However, a more parsimonious explanation would be that temporal judgments arise from a common mechanism, regardless of stimulus material or context. In the current manuscript, we reanalysed the results of two previously published experiments and investigated the effect of boundary segmentation and semantic relatedness during encoding in two new experiments. We found that participants showed more temporal uncertainty when the encoded visual objects and contexts were unrelated. Further, we found that increasing the semantic associations during encoding diminished temporal uncertainty but increased temporal underestimation bias, which we interpret as an indication of temporal compression. A simple computational model in which temporal judgment is based on a Gaussian process defined by temporal uncertainty (dispersion) and temporal bias (location) replicated the empirical data of all four experiments, suggesting that patterns of temporal errors observed in different experiments arise from a common mechanism. The model further underscores that semantic relatedness between items decreases temporal uncertainty but enhances temporal compression. These findings have important ramifications for how we memorize the temporal structure of events.