Dataset Information

Neural plasticity after pre-linguistic injury to the arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi.

ABSTRACT: We describe the case of girl who was born prematurely and diagnosed periventricular leukomalacia, a condition characterized by severe injury to the white matter tracts primarily surrounding the ventricles. At 12 years of age, we obtained diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data on this child as part of a research protocol. Multiple analyses of DTI data, including tractography, showed that the left and right arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi were missing in the child though all other major white matter tracts were present. Standardized psychometric tests at age 12 years revealed that despite early language delays, she had average scores on expressive language, sentence repetition, and reading, functions that have been hypothesized to depend on signals carried by the arcuate fasciculus. We identified intact ventral connections between the temporal and frontal lobes through the extreme capsule fiber system and uncinate fasciculus. Preserved language and reading function after serious injury to the arcuate fasciculus highlights the plasticity of the developing brain after severe white matter injury early in life.

SUBMITTER: Yeatman JD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3259257 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neural plasticity after pre-linguistic injury to the arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi.

Yeatman Jason D JD Feldman Heidi M HM

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 20110902 1

We describe the case of girl who was born prematurely and diagnosed periventricular leukomalacia, a condition characterized by severe injury to the white matter tracts primarily surrounding the ventricles. At 12 years of age, we obtained diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data on this child as part of a research protocol. Multiple analyses of DTI data, including tractography, showed that the left and right arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi were missing in the child though all other major w ...[more]

PMID: 21937035

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Project description:Traumatic brain injury (TBI)-induced disruptions in synaptic function within brain regions and across networks in the limbic system may underlie a vulnerability for maladaptive plasticity and contribute to behavioral comorbidities. In this study we measured how synaptic proteins respond to lateral fluid percussion injury (FPI) brain regions known to regulate emotion and memory, including the basolateral amygdala (BLA), dorsal and ventral hippocampus (DH, VH), and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC). We investigated proteins involved in regulating plasticity, including synaptic glutamatergic a-amino-3-hydroxy5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA; GluA1, GluA2) and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA; NR1, NR2A, NR2B) receptor subunits as well as inhibitory gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) synthetic enzymes (GAD67, GAD65) via western blot. Adult male rats received a mild-moderate lateral FPI or sham surgery and ipsi- and contralateral BLA, DH, VH, and PFC were collected 6 h, 24 h, 48 h, and 7 days post-injury. In the ipsilateral BLA, there was a significant decrease in NR1 and GluA2 24 h after injury, whereas NR2A and NR2B were increased in the contralateral BLA at 48 h compared with sham. GAD67 was increased ipsilaterally at 24 h, but decreased contralaterally at 48 h in the BLA. In the DH, both NMDA (NR2A, NR2B) and GABA-synthetic (GAD65, GAD67) proteins were increased acutely at 6 h compared with sham. GAD67 was also robustly increased in the ipsilateral VH at 6 h. In the contralateral VH, NR2A significantly increased between 6 h and 24 h after FPI, whereas GAD65 was decreased across the same time-points in the contralateral VH. In the medial PFC at 24 h we saw bilateral increases in GAD67 and a contralateral decrease in GluA1. Later, there was a significant decrease in GAD67 in contralateral PFC from 48 h to 7 days post-injury. Collectively, these data suggest that lateral FPI causes a dynamic homeostatic response across limbic networks, leading to an imbalance of the proteins involved in plasticity in neural systems underlying cognitive and emotional regulation.

Project description:The brain is thought to combine linguistic knowledge of words and nonlinguistic knowledge of their referents to encode sentence meaning. However, functional neuroimaging studies aiming at decoding language meaning from neural activity have mostly relied on distributional models of word semantics, which are based on patterns of word co-occurrence in text corpora. Here, we present initial evidence that modeling nonlinguistic "experiential" knowledge contributes to decoding neural representations of sentence meaning. We model attributes of peoples' sensory, motor, social, emotional, and cognitive experiences with words using behavioral ratings. We demonstrate that fMRI activation elicited in sentence reading is more accurately decoded when this experiential attribute model is integrated with a text-based model than when either model is applied in isolation (participants were 5 males and 9 females). Our decoding approach exploits a representation-similarity-based framework, which benefits from being parameter free, while performing at accuracy levels comparable with those from parameter fitting approaches, such as ridge regression. We find that the text-based model contributes particularly to the decoding of sentences containing linguistically oriented "abstract" words and reveal tentative evidence that the experiential model improves decoding of more concrete sentences. Finally, we introduce a cross-participant decoding method to estimate an upper bound on model-based decoding accuracy. We demonstrate that a substantial fraction of neural signal remains unexplained, and leverage this gap to pinpoint characteristics of weakly decoded sentences and hence identify model weaknesses to guide future model development.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Language gives humans the unique ability to communicate about historical events, theoretical concepts, and fiction. Although words are learned through language and defined by their relations to other words in dictionaries, our understanding of word meaning presumably draws heavily on our nonlinguistic sensory, motor, interoceptive, and emotional experiences with words and their referents. Behavioral experiments lend support to the intuition that word meaning integrates aspects of linguistic and nonlinguistic "experiential" knowledge. However, behavioral measures do not provide a window on how meaning is represented in the brain and tend to necessitate artificial experimental paradigms. We present a model-based approach that reveals early evidence that experiential and linguistically acquired knowledge can be detected in brain activity elicited in reading natural sentences.

Dataset Information

Neural plasticity after pre-linguistic injury to the arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi.

Publications

Neural plasticity after pre-linguistic injury to the arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi.

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