Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences最新文献

Spinal cord injury (SCI) and sciatic nerve injury (SNI) represent distinct neurotrauma models with different pathological outcomes. Although both injuries result in severe motor and sensory dysfunction in the lower limbs, their divergent mechanisms of muscle atrophy and neural circuit remodeling remain poorly understood. This study systematically compared electrophysiological and morphological alterations at multiple time points post-injury. At 4 weeks, SNI induced severe muscle atrophy and complete loss of compound muscle action potentials (CMAPs), whereas SCI caused mild atrophy and moderate CMAP amplitude reduction. Neuromuscular junctions were fully denervated within 1 week after SNI but remained intact in SCI. Neither SCI nor SNI altered motor neuron number/area, though SNI triggered transient NeuN downregulation in these neurons. Divergent neural circuit reorganization also occurred: SNI eliminated vGluT1⁺ Ia synapses from ventral horn motor neurons, while SCI promoted vGluT1⁺ Ia afferent sprouting alongside reduced GAD65⁺ inhibitory terminals. Additionally, glial responses differed markedly: SCI induced widespread spinal microgliosis/astrocytosis, whereas SNI caused localized ventral/dorsal horn gliosis near axotomized neurons. Nociceptive fiber plasticity also diverged: SCI upregulated CGRP⁺ dorsal horn terminals without affecting IB4⁺ fibers, while SNI abolished both CGRP⁺ and IB4⁺ terminals. These findings demonstrate fundamentally distinct pathological cascades in SCI versus SNI, providing mechanistic insights for developing tailored neurotrauma treatments.

Digital collaborative education plays a pivotal role in digital education research and significantly contributes to enhancing teaching quality. Furthermore, it provides a new impetus for family–school–community collaboration in talent development. Nevertheless, the key drivers and predictive models of digital collaborative education remain underexplored. To address this gap, this study adopts the perspective of teachers' digital literacy, focusing on primary and secondary school teachers as research subjects. Employing machine learning methods such as gradient boosting regression trees (GBRT) and random forest, we identify the key factors influencing digital collaborative education and develop predictive models. The SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) framework is applied to conduct holistic, heterogeneous, and individual-level explanatory analyses, whereas accumulated local effects (ALE) plots are used for single-feature explanation. The results indicate that random forest outperforms other models in predicting digital collaborative education. Digital academic assessment, digital instructional implementation, digital teaching design, and digital instructional research and innovation are the four most important feature variables in predicting the effectiveness of digital collaborative education, with digital application emerging as the strongest predictor, followed by professional development. These key features exhibit heterogeneity in predicting digital collaborative education across gender, age, educational background, and teaching experience, demonstrating nonlinear relationships. The findings provide empirical support for advancing digital collaborative education and offer valuable insights for enhancing teachers' professional development.

The following systematic review provides an evaluation of the effectiveness of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) transplantation in the treatment of osteogenesis imperfecta (OI). After reviewing 40 studies, 9 human clinical studies that included case reports or case series were included and resulted in a total of 12 patients with OI. Five studies documented an increase in total body bone mineral (TBBM) content, whereas four studies observed a reduction in fracture rates post-transplantation. Moreover, noticeable improvements in children's growth were recorded. Although both BMSCs and human fetal MSCs (hfMSCs) were found to be effective, studies involving BMSCs were rated higher in terms of methodological quality. Both BMSCs and hfMSCs demonstrated significant improvements in TBBM, growth rates, and fracture reduction, with BMSC studies scoring higher in methodological quality. Future randomized clinical trials with longer follow-ups are necessary.

Previous research has implicated involvement of the cerebellum in high-level cognitive functions. The present study aimed to investigate the role of the cerebellum in bilingual language control and domain-general cognitive control. Chinese–English bilinguals were instructed to perform a language-switching task and a cognitive control task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. Using both univariate and multivariate analyses, we aimed to explore the functional overlaps and dissociations in the cerebellum between these two cognitive processes. The results demonstrated that the bilateral posterolateral cerebellum, including bilateral lobule VI and right Crus I, is engaged in both language control and cognitive control. In contrast, multivariate analyses identified distinct activation patterns in the right Crus I/II and right lobule VIII between the two tasks. For the first time, our study demonstrates that the cerebellum, analogous to the cerebral cortex, exhibits hierarchical processing in these two cognitive processes.

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting musical ability. Previous studies have demonstrated that music reward sensitivity has both functional and structural bases. However, the nature of music reward sensitivity and its neural underpinnings in amusia remains unclear. This study combined the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire and magnetic resonance imaging to investigate resting-state functional and structural correlates of music reward sensitivity in individuals with amusia. Behavioral results indicate individuals with amusia exhibit reduced sensitivity to music, including social rewards, mood regulation, emotional evocation, sensorimotor processing, and music seeking. Brain imaging revealed abnormalities in several classic cognitive and reward-related functional and structural brain areas. Specifically, individuals with amusia have abnormal resting-state functional activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) along with altered functional and structural connectivity between the IFG and the striatum. Notably, reduced sensorimotor sensitivity to music in amusia is associated with increased resting-state functional activity in the IFG and enhanced structural connectivity between the IFG and nucleus accumbens (NAcc). Furthermore, the function of the IFG appears to influence the sensorimotor sensitivity via the IFG-NAcc structural connectivity in amusia. These findings suggest the cognitive system and its interactions with the reward system play crucial roles in developmental music disorder.