In the spotlight: How the brainstem modulates information flow

Vestibular prepulse inhibition of the human blink reflex

“…In addition, our results are consistent with the observation that if the intensity of the prepulse stimulus is enough to generate a response (i.e. the VOR in our experiment), such response does not interfere with inhibition of the R2 response (Kofler et al, 2023). Therefore, it is not surprising that vPPI is independent form the activation of the VOR network.…”

“…However, in humans, it seems to be involved in a broader set of functions, such as posture (Breit et al, 2023, Joza et al, 2022, Lin et al, 2023), eye movements (Ewenczyk et al, 2017, Gallea et al, 2021), sleep (Gallea et al, 2017), and cognition (Mena-Segovia and Bolam, 2011, Petzold et al, 2015). Some of these functions rely on the integration of different sensory feedback loops, and PPI has been already advocated as a promising tool to measure how the brainstem integrates peripheral feedbacks (Kofler et al, 2023), also during tasks where the modulation of the PPN may have a pivotal role (Versace et al, 2019). Indeed, we showed here how vestibular inputs can be integrated at the level of the brainstem similarly to other sensory modalities (i.e.…”

“…Sensorimotor gating is an essential central nervous system mechanism which allows the organism to focus on relevant stimuli and prevent overload or hyperresponsiveness to innocuous sensory inputs (Garcia-Rill et al, 2019, Kofler et al, 2023). Disruption of sensorimotor gating has been described in neurodegenerative disease, such as Parkinson’s disease (Millian-Morell et al, 2018), multiple system atrophy (Zoetmulder et al, 2014), and Huntington’s disease (Valls-Sole et al, 2004), and functional movement disorders (Hanzlikova et al, 2019).…”