While a physiologically active dose of caffeine has no simple effects on PPI in normal humans, both withdrawal states and normal levels of caffeine consumption may be important factors in understanding this drug's effects on sensorimotor gating.
Multiple primary malignancies (MPMs) are present when a patient is diagnosed with more than one primary malignancy and when each tumor is histologically unrelated to the others. MPMs are considered synchronous when they present within 6 months of one another. Here, we report the case of a 57-year-old woman with a past medical history significant for melanoma in 1988, who presented in 2014 with 5 distinct tumors within 4 months: malignant melanoma of the right popliteal fossa, invasive lobular breast carcinoma, diffuse large B cell lymphoma, nodular lymphocyte predominant Hodgkin lymphoma, and a giant cell tumor of tendon sheath/pigmented villonodular synovitis. We discuss her treatment and also present a brief review of the literature. The incidence of MPMs appears to be on the rise, which demands an interdisciplinary, multimodal, and personalized approach to care.
Startle magnitude is reduced when a startling stimulus is preceded 30-500 msec by a weak prepulse. Although the neurobiology of prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the startle reflex has been studied across species, relatively little is known about the relationship between reduced PPI and informationprocessing abnormalities in specific neuropsychiatric disorders. In one conceptual model of PPI, the reduced responsivity to sensory events after a prepulse protects the information contained in the prepulse, so that it can be processed adequately. Thus deficient PPI might reflect reduced informationprotective abilities and contribute to cognitive dysfunction. Nevertheless, there is little concrete evidence to support this conceptual model. In the present experiment, the relationship of PPI and perceived stimulus intensity was investigated, using both unimodal and cross-modal stimuli to elicit startle and PPI in nonpsychiatric human subjects. The subjects rated the intensity of a startle stimulus presented alone or 60 msec after the onset of an acoustic prepulse versus the intensity of an identical startle stimulus alone, presented 5 sec earlier or later. A negative relationship was observed between the amount of PPI produced by a range of weak-to-intense acoustic prepulses and the perceived intensity of either acoustic or tactile startle stimuli. These fmdings support an information-protective model for the impact of weak prestimuli on perceived startle stimulus intensity and suggest that deficient PPI in neuropsychiatric disorders may be accompanied by a reduced ability to automatically inhibit, or gate, sensory information.
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