TY  - JOUR
A1  - Goepel, Johanna
A1  - Biehl, Stefanie C.
A1  - Kissler, Johanna
A1  - Paul-Jordanov, Isabelle
T1  - Pro- and antisaccades in children elicited by visual and acoustic targets - does modality matter?
JF  - BMC Pediatrics
N2  - Background: 

Children are able to inhibit a prepotent reaction to suddenly arising visual stimuli, although this skill is not yet as pronounced as it is in adulthood. However, up to now the inhibition mechanism to acoustic stimuli has been scarcely investigated 

Methods: 

Reflexive (prosaccade) and inhibitory (antisaccade) responses to visual and acoustic targets were examined with an eye tracker system in 31 children between seven and twelve years of age using a gap-overlap task and two target eccentricities.

Results: 

Acoustically cued saccades had longer reaction times than visually cued saccades. A gap effect (i.e., shorter reaction time in the gap than the overlap condition) was only found for visually elicited saccades, whereas an eccentricity effect (i.e., faster saccades to more laterally presented targets - 12 degrees vs. 6 degrees or rather 90 degrees vs. 45 degrees) was only present in the acoustic condition. Longer reaction times of antisaccades compared to prosaccades were found only in the visual task. Across both tasks the typical pattern of elevated error rates in the antisaccade condition was found. Antisaccade errors declined with age, indicating an ongoing development of inhibitory functions. 

Conclusions: 

The present results lay the ground for further studies of acoustically triggered saccades in typically as well as atypically developing children and it might thus be possible to upgrade physiological diagnostic tools.
KW  - Saccadic eye-movements
KW  - Auditory targets
KW  - Voluntary control
KW  - Task-performance
KW  - Latency
KW  - Prosaccade
KW  - Vergence
KW  - Stimuli
KW  - GAP
Y1  - 2011
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-141807
VL  - 11
IS  - 116
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Binder, Andreas
A1  - May, Denisa
A1  - Baron, Ralf
A1  - Maier, Christoph
A1  - Tölle, Thomas R.
A1  - Treede, Rolf-Detlef
A1  - Berthele, Achim
A1  - Faltraco, Frank
A1  - Flor, Herta
A1  - Gierthmühlen, Janne
A1  - Haenisch, Sierk
A1  - Huge, Volker
A1  - Magerl, Walter
A1  - Maihöfner, Christian
A1  - Richter, Helmut
A1  - Rolke, Roman
A1  - Scherens, Andrea
A1  - Üçeyler, Nurcan
A1  - Ufer, Mike
A1  - Wasner, Gunnar
A1  - Zhu, Jihong
A1  - Cascorbi, Ingolf
T1  - Transient Receptor Potential Channel Polymorphisms Are Associated with the Somatosensory Function in Neuropathic Pain Patients
JF  - PLoS ONE
N2  - Transient receptor potential channels are important mediators of thermal and mechanical stimuli and play an important role in neuropathic pain. The contribution of hereditary variants in the genes of transient receptor potential channels to neuropathic pain is unknown. We investigated the frequency of transient receptor potential ankyrin 1, transient receptor potential melastin 8 and transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 single nucleotide polymorphisms and their impact on somatosensory abnormalities in neuropathic pain patients. Within the German Research Network on Neuropathic Pain (Deutscher Forscbungsverbund Neuropathischer Schmerz) 371 neuropathic pain patients were phenotypically characterized using standardized quantitative sensory testing. Pyrosequencing was employed to determine a total of eleven single nucleotide polymorphisms in transient receptor potential channel genes of the neuropathic pain patients and a cohort of 253 German healthy volunteers. Associations of quantitative sensory testing parameters and single nucleotide polymorphisms between and within groups and subgroups, based on sensory phenotypes, were analyzed. Single nucleotide polymorphisms frequencies did not differ between both the cohorts. However, in neuropathic pain patients transient receptor potential ankyrin 1 710G>A (rs920829, E179K) was associated with the presence of paradoxical heat sensation (p=0.03), and transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 1911A>G (rs8065080, I585V) with cold hypoalgesia (p=0.0035). Two main subgroups characterized by preserved (1) and impaired (2) sensory function were identified. In subgroup 1 transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 1911A>G led to significantly less heat hyperalgesia, pinprick hyperalgesia and mechanical hypaesthesia (p=0.006, p=0.005 and p<0.001) and transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 1103C>G (rs222747, M315I) to cold hypaesthesia (p=0.002), but there was absence of associations in subgroup 2. In this study we found no evidence that genetic variants of transient receptor potential channels are involved in the expression of neuropathic pain, but transient receptor potential channel polymorphisms contributed significantly to the somatosensory abnormalities of neuropathic pain patients.
KW  - Paradoxical heat sensation
KW  - Neurogenic inflammation
KW  - Capsaicin receptor
KW  - TRP Channels
KW  - Cold
KW  - Mechanisms
KW  - Hyperalgesia
KW  - Sensitivity
KW  - Expression
KW  - Stimuli
Y1  - 2011
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-142782
VL  - 6
IS  - 3
ER  -