We hypothesized that in Toxoplasma gondii infection, communication among immune cells promotes neuroinflammation through cytokine networks and induces pain sensitivity under conditions of neuropathic pain. The animal model of Toxoplasma infection was established by the intraperitoneal inoculation of 20-25 tissue cysts from Tehran strain of T. gondii to BALB/c mice. Amitriptyline (20 mg/kg, i.p., 1/day) administrated to animals for 7 days before behavioral tests. Pain behavioral tests including tail flick, hot plate, and formalin test were evaluated in all the groups. The mRNA levels of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β, and IL-6 were examined by real-time PCR. Results revealed that T. gondii induce hyperalgesia in the infected mice, whereas amitriptyline showed a promising effect against the hyperalgesia induced by Toxoplasma infection. The mRNA levels of the aforementioned cytokines significantly (P < 0.05) increased in the infected mice compared to the uninfected ones. Obtained findings suggested that T. gondii infection could promote neuroinflammation through cytokine networks and induced hyperalgesia in BALB/c mice, whereas amitriptyline as an analgesic drug reverses them.

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is an aromatic spice (cardamom) native to the humid Asian areas, which contains some compounds with a potential anticonvulsant activity. Various pharmacological properties such as anti-inflammatory, analgesic, antioxidant, and antimicrobial effects have been related to this plant. This research was conducted to examine the probable protective impact of the essential oil and methanolic extract of against chemically (pentylentetrazole)- and electrically (maximal electroshock)-induced seizures in mice. In addition, neurotoxicity, acute lethality, and phytochemistry of the essential oil and methanolic extract were estimated. The TLC method showed the presence of kaempferol, rutin, and quercetin in the extract, and the concentration of quercetin in the extract was 0.5 µg/mL. The major compounds in the essential oil were 1,8-cineole (45.6 %),-terpinyl acetate (33.7 %), sabinene (3.8 %), 4-terpinen-4-ol (2.4 %), and myrcene (2.2 %), respectively. The extract and essential oil showed significant neurotoxicity in the rotarod test at the doses of 1.5 g/kg and 0.75 mL/kg, respectively. No mortalities were observed up to the doses of 2 g/kg and 0.75 mL/kg for the extract and essential oil. The essential oil was effective in both the pentylentetrazole and maximal electroshock models; however, the extract was only effective in the pentylentetrazole model. The study suggested that methanolic extract had no significant lethality in mice. Both the essential oil and methanolic extract showed movement toxicity. Anticonvulsant effects of were negligible against the seizures induced by pentylentetrazole and maximal electroshock.

In both human and animal studies, the effect of sleep deficiency on cognitive performances has mostly been studied during adulthood in males, but very little data exist concerning the effects of poor sleep in gonadal hormones-depleted status, such as aging or gonadectomized (GDX) male animal models. The present study investigated the potential modulatory effects of the endogenous male sex hormones on the 48h REM sleep deprivation (SD)-induced cognitive and synaptic impairments by comparing the gonadally intact with castrated male rats, a rodent model of androgen-deprived male animals. The multiple platform method was used for inducing REM-SD and spatial performances were evaluated using Morris water maze (MWM) task. Early long-term potentiation (E-LTP) was measured in area CA1 of the hippocampus and PCR and western blotting assays were employed to assess brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene and protein expression in the hippocampus. To reveal any influence of sleep loss on stress level, we also evaluated the plasma corticosterone levels of animals. Regardless of reproductive status, REM-SD significantly disrupted short-term memory and LTP, as well as hippocampal BDNF expression. The corticosterone levels were not significantly changed following REM-SD neither in intact nor in GDX male rats. These findings suggest that depletion of male sex steroid hormones by castration does not lead to any heightened sensitivity of male animals to the deleterious effects of 48h REM-SD on cognitive and synaptic performances.

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Image reconstruction using minimal measured information has been a long-standing open problem in many computational imaging approaches, in particular in-line holography. Many solutions are devised based on compressive sensing (CS) techniques with handcrafted image priors or supervised Deep Neural Networks (DNN). However, the limited performance of CS methods due to lack of information about the image priors and the requirement of an enormous amount of per-sample-type training resources for DNNs has posed new challenges over the primary problem. In this study, we propose a single-shot lensless in-line holographic reconstruction method using an untrained deep neural network which is incorporated with a physical image formation algorithm. We demonstrate that by modifying a deep decoder network with simple regularizers, a Gabor hologram can be inversely reconstructed via a minimization process that is constrained by a deep image prior. The outcoming model allows to accurately recover the phase and amplitude images without any training dataset, excess measurements, or specific assumptions about the object’s or the measurement’s characteristics.

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