Neurological Disorders

Background: Neurological disorders prevalence burdens the healthcare system. These neurological disorders are defined as functional impairments that affect the nervous system; the clinical neuropathological manifestations can present structural, biochemical, or electrical abnormalities.

Zebrafish disease models have been used extensively to study human neuropathological and behavioral disorders due to the unique in vivo live real-time visualization of the developing nervous system within the transparent model.

Myelin is a lipoprotein of a fatty multilayered membrane that surrounds the axons of the nerve cells. The myelination of the axons increases the electrical impulse speed rate through the nervous system and indicates the proper function of the nervous system.

In zebrafish model, histological procedures are employed to study the nervous system. However, the proper orientation and serial sections should be obtained the neuroanatomy of the brain at the cellular level. Consequently, it is challenging to examine the structural alterations in real dimensional developing brain.
Luxol fast blue is used to stain myelin sheath which is rich in phospholipids. This stain is used to differentiate white matter (rich in myelin) from the grey matter in brain tissue sections.

Results: Here, we developed a new method of whole-mount staining that optimize the penetration of staining regents of luxol fast blue into the white and gray matter of zebrafish larvae developing brain with decrease non-specific binding and background. Our result showed the clear anatomical structures of the central nervous system as a utility for experimental neuropathology in zebrafish model.

Conclusion: Our developed method provides three-dimensional visualization of the developing central nervous system of zebrafish; this is useful to characterize neuron demyelination in corresponding disease model.

Central-parietal N200 is an ERP component that associates with orthographic processing in Chinese word recognition. Studies have shown that it may be related to the early processing of morpheme structures. Compound words can be regarded as the smallest unit of morpheme combination, the recognition process can be analogous to the comprehension of the sentence, including combining constituent morphemes. This process includes grammatical combinations and semantic combinations. Studies have found that the semantic combination takes place during the N400 time-window. Generally speaking, the grammatical combination should occur before the semantic combination, so does the structure priming that occurred during the N200 time-window represent grammatical combination? We explored this issue by using Chinese coordinative compounds and ERP technology. We found that there is a significant grammatical structure priming effect in the processing of Chinese compound words. This effect occurs in the early stage of word processing, that is, the N200 period. Combined with the previous research, the semantic relation priming occurred in the N400 window, indicating that the grammatical combination did appear before the semantic combination, and outlined the time course of the effect of relation information.

With the emerging as well evolving revascularization therapy of central nervous system there is always an urgency to diagnose stroke at earliest presentation. In intent to avoid treatment within window period we are on the benefit of doubt, thus stroke mimic baffles clinician especially emergency physician. Here, we report a 46 years old male presenting with unilateral neurological deficit secondary to cervical spinal abscess provisionally diagnosed as stroke.