Evidence from behavioral, electrophysiological and diffusion-weighted imaging studies suggest that schizophrenia patients suffer from deficiencies in bilateral brain communication, and this disruption may be related to the occurrence of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH). To increase our understanding of aberrant inter-hemispheric communication in relation to AVH, we recruited two groups of first-episode schizophrenia patients: one group with AVH (N = 18 AVH patients) and one without hallucinations (N = 18 Non-AVH patients), and 20 healthy controls. All participants received T1 structural imaging and resting-state fMRI scanning. We adopted a newly developed index, voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC), to quantitatively describe bilateral functional connectivity. The whole-brain VMHC measure was compared among the three groups and correlation analyses were conducted between symptomology scores and neurological measures. Our findings suggest all patients shared abnormalities in parahippocampus and striatum. Aberrant bilateral connectivity of default mode network (DMN), inferior frontal gyrus and cerebellum only showed in AVH patients, whereas aberrances in superior temporal gyrus and precentral gyrus were specific to Non-AVH patients. Meanwhile, inter-hemispheric connectivity of DMN correlated with patients’ symptomatology scores. This study corroborates that schizophrenia is characterized by inter-hemispheric dysconnectivity, and suggests the localization of such abnormalities may be crucial to whether auditory verbal hallucinations develop.
Heart disease is among the leading causes of death worldwide, and the limited proliferation of mammalian cardiomyocytes prevents heart regeneration in response to injury. Bone morphogenetic protein-10 (BMP10) exerts multiple roles in various developmental events; however, the effect of BMP10 and the underlying mechanism involved in cardiac repair remains unclear. After stimulation with the recombinant BMP10, an obvious dose-dependent cardiomyocyte proliferation and reentry of differentiated mammalian cardiomyocytes into the cell cycle was observed. Furthermore, BMP10 stimulation strikingly enhanced Tbx20 expression. Further analysis demonstrated that T-box 20 (Tbx20) was involved in BMP10-induced proliferation of differentiated cardiomyocytes as preconditioning with Tbx20 siRNA significantly attenuated BMP10-induced DNA synthesis. In vivo, BMP10 induced rat cardiomyocyte DNA synthesis and cytokinesis. After myocardial infarction (MI), BMP10 stimulated cardiomyocyte cell-cycle reentry and mitosis, resulting in the decrease of infarct size and improvement of cardiac repair. Taken together, these data indicated that BMP10 stimulated cardiomyocyte proliferation and repaired cardiac function after heart injury. Consequently, BMP10 may be a potential target for innovative strategies against heart failure.
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